Microsoft responds to Delta after massive outage, saying airline rejected ‘multiple’ offers of help – NBC 7 San Diego

• A Microsoft lawyer said CEO Satya Nadella sent an email to Delta CEO Ed Bastian but did not receive a response.
• The disruptions have cost the airline about $500 million, CEO Bastian said last week, and he said the company would seek compensation.
• A lawyer representing Microsoft said the key crew scheduling system that crashed was serviced by other technology companies, including IBM.

Microsoft responded to Delta Air Lines on Tuesday by saying the carrier intends to seek compensation from the software giant and CrowdStrike for thousands of canceled flights resulting from a major IT failure.

Delta has had a harder time than rival airlines recovering from the outage, canceling more than 5,000 flights in the days following the July 19 incident, which was triggered by a botched software update from CrowdStrike and affected millions of Microsoft Windows computers. It cost the carrier about $500 million, CEO Ed Bastian said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” last week.

Bastian said the Atlanta-based airline, which prides itself on punctuality and positions itself as a premium airline, had “no other option” but to take legal action against the two technology companies.

Mark Cheffo, a Dechert partner representing Microsoft, sent a letter Tuesday to attorney David Boies of Boies Schiller Flexner. Boies represents Delta and sent the letters on behalf of the airline to CrowdStrike and Microsoft.

“We have reason to believe that Microsoft breached its contractual obligations and acted with gross negligence, even willfulness, in connection with the defective update” from CrowdStrike that caused Windows computers to crash, Boies said in a July 29 letter to Microsoft general counsel Hossein Nowbar.

In his response, Cheffo said Microsoft sympathizes with Delta and its customers for the impact of the CrowdStrike incident. “But your letter and Delta’s public comments are incomplete, false, misleading, and damaging to Microsoft and its reputation,” he said.

The response is similar to CrowdStrike’s letter Sunday denying Delta’s claims. Cheffo wrote that Microsoft offered Delta free help. Every day from July 19 to July 23, Microsoft employees said they could help, but Delta turned them down, according to the letter.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella sent an email to Bastian, “who never responded,” Cheffo wrote. CrowdStrike also said CEO George Kurtz reached out to his counterpart at Delta “but received no response.”

Cheffo described a July 22 letter in which Microsoft offered assistance to a Delta employee. The Delta employee responded, “Everything is fine. Great, I’ll let you know and thank you.”

Delta executives said the outage, which led to more cancellations than in all of 2019, overwhelmed the crew-scheduling platform that matches crews to flights. But Cheffo said Delta does not rely on Windows or Microsoft Azure cloud services.

In 2021, IBM announced a multi-year agreement with Delta to help the airline implement a hybrid cloud architecture running on Red Hat’s OpenShift software. In 2022, Amazon said Delta had selected the digital commerce company’s Amazon Web Services unit as its preferred cloud provider.

“It’s quickly becoming apparent that Delta likely rejected Microsoft’s help because the IT system it had the most trouble getting back up and running — the crew tracking and scheduling system — was supported by other technology vendors, such as IBM, because it runs on those vendors’ systems, not Microsoft Windows or Azure.”

Bastian said Delta had to manually reset 40,000 servers last week.

Microsoft is demanding that Delta preserve records showing how much technology from IBM, Amazon and others contributed to the airline’s problems between July 19 and July 24, Cheffo wrote. Spokespeople for IBM and Amazon had no immediate comment.

Cheffo said Microsoft is still trying to understand why American Airlines, United Airlines and other airlines were able to recover losses faster than Delta.

“Our initial analysis indicates that Delta, unlike its competitors, has clearly not modernized its IT infrastructure, either for the benefit of its customers or its pilots and cabin crew,” Cheffo wrote.

Delta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Bastian told CNBC last week: “If you want access, priority access, to the Delta ecosystem in terms of technology, you have to test it. You can’t come to a mission critical 24/7 and tell us we have a bug. It doesn’t work.”