The meltdown suffered by Delta Air Lines following the CrowdStrike technology outage cost the company “half a billion dollars,” Delta CEO Ed Bastian said in a televised interview Wednesday, vowing to pursue claims against the security firm and Microsoft.
Bastian told CNBC his company was hit hardest among airlines because “we’re by far the heaviest in the industry” in using both CrowdStrike and Microsoft. The July 19 outage, the result of a faulty CrowdStrike security update, hit users of Microsoft applications across the globe.
“So we got hit the hardest in terms of the recovery capability,” Bastian said on CNBC’s Squawk Box show on Wednesday morning, in his first such appearance since the airline’s mass cancellations began.
“This cost us a half a billion dollars,” he said, including lost revenue and tens of millions of dollars a day in compensation to customers and hotel costs.
Delta canceled more than 6,000 flights, stranding hundreds of thousands of passengers with thousands ending up stuck in airports worldwide. Even after Delta got systems back up and running, the airline’s crew tracking system remained overloaded and dysfunctional.