Microsoft and Delta Airlines are at odds following a significant outage experienced in July involving CrowdStrike’s software, leading to extensive flight disruptions.
Legal representatives for Microsoft addressed Delta’s legal team, indicating that Delta shares responsibility for the flight issues that arose during the weekend in question. This response came after Delta CEO Ed Bastian made remarks that questioned Microsoft’s effectiveness, which Microsoft characterized as “incomplete, false, misleading, and damaging” to its reputation.
Microsoft Denies Responsibility for Delta’s Flight Disruptions
Microsoft asserts that it offered to assist Delta in resolving the CrowdStrike incident free of charge soon after the outage occurred. However, the company claims that Delta declined the offer, stating that the IT infrastructure requiring attention was managed by another vendor, such as IBM, rather than Microsoft.
The dispute highlights a fundamental disagreement between Microsoft and Delta regarding the root cause of the substantial delays and cancellations that affected flights that weekend.
The outage was triggered by a problematic update to CrowdStrike’s security software, which was not developed by Microsoft. Despite this, the faulty update was distributed to millions of Windows devices globally, resulting in a significant number of system failures.
