Delta CEO reveals how much the CrowdStrike outage cost the company

The CEO of Delta Air Lines, Ed Bastian has said during an interview on Wednesday the global CrowdStrike outage cost the company half a billion dollars in lost revenue, as the company was forced to cancel thousands of flights and put travelers up in hotels.

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The global CrowdStrike catastrophe is still unfolding. We are just now hearing the first estimations of how much revenue was lost as a result of millions of Windows PCs being thrown into blue screen of death boot loops. For those who don't know, CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company, pushed out a faulty update to its security software, which is downloaded on millions of Windows machines around the world.

The faulty driver update triggered an error within the kernel, or before the PC boots to the user mode of Windows, leading to infinite blue screens of death. It was only recently that a cloud monitoring and insurance company estimated the global loss of revenue as a result of the outage to be $15 billion. That same insurance company estimated an $830 million loss for airlines.

This report was followed by Delta hiring esteemed attorney David Boies, the chairman of the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner, who rose to fame for his role in the landmark case the US government won against Microsoft, to seek damages from CrowdStrike and Microsoft. Now, Delta's CEO Ed Bastian has said the outage will cost the company $500 million, and that figure includes the loss of revenue in putting customers up in hotels, which is estimated to cost "tens of millions of dollars per day".

Bastian also revealed the company was required to manually reset 40,000 servers following the faulty update, and that the airline had to cancel more than 5,000 flights. Bastian said the company has "no choice" but to seek damages for the outage, saying that a company can't have access to Delta's critical system infrastructure "you've got to test the stuff" that is rolled out as Delta is a 24/7 operation.

Furthermore, Bastian pointed out CrowdStrike hasn't offered to aid Delta financially, and when CrowdStrike was asked about a lawsuit between the companies, a spokesperson said it has "no knowledge of a lawsuit and have no further comment."

This is likely the first of many lawsuits that will be filed in response to the CrowdStrike outage, and if any hold any validity in court, which it appears they likely will considering how widespread of an issue the outage has become, it will likely result in a new precedent being set with how much third-party access is granted the kernel level of Windows machines, and the checks and balances process of rolling out updates to systems supporting critical infrastructure.

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