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August 1 news, Wednesday, US time,Delta AirlinesThe company's CEO, Ed Bastian, revealed that the "MicrosoftBlue Screen"The incident severely affected the company's operations, disrupted the travel plans of many passengers, and directly caused a loss of approximately US$500 million.

Bastian said the figure includes not only lost revenue, but also "tens of millions of dollars a day in compensation and hotel placement costs" over five days. This figure is consistent with the predictions of industry analysts. Although Delta did not specify how many refunds and reimbursement applications were processed, it confirmed that the number of affected passengers was huge.

Before July 25, DeltaairlineMore than 5,000 flights were canceled due to this technical failure, far exceeding the total number for the whole of 2019. The root cause of the service interruption was a software update error from cybersecurity vendor CrowdStrike, which affected thousands of Microsoft systems worldwide, forcing Delta Airlines to urgently manually restart its 40,000 servers to resume operations.

In addition, the system outage also caused serious delays in Delta Air Lines' crew and flight matching system, further exacerbating operational chaos.

Similar to the difficulties encountered by Southwest Airlines during the 2022 year-end holiday season due to extreme weather, Delta's outage highlights some of the vulnerabilities in the airline's technology system. Compared with other airlines, Delta has been slower to recover from the CrowdStrike software problem, and its continuous outages and strong reactions from passengers have prompted the U.S. Department of Transportation to intervene in the investigation. This is a rare setback for Delta Airlines, which has always been known for its profitability and punctuality.

Bastien, who was traveling in Paris last week, said in an interview on Wednesday that the company will seek compensation for the outage and stressed that "we have no choice." "If you are at the forefront of technology that is intended to be integrated into the Delta ecosystem, it must be rigorously tested. You cannot just deploy a vulnerable system into a mission-critical environment that runs 24/7," he said.

Bastian further pointed out that, as of now, CrowdStrike has not offered to provide financial assistance to Delta Airlines, and is limited to providing free consulting advice on how to deal with the consequences of the suspension. CrowdStrike said in an emailed statement that they "know nothing about this lawsuit and have no further comment." At the same time, Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

To seek compensation from CrowdStrike and Microsoft, Delta has hired David Boies, a well-known lawyer who played a key role in the U.S. government's antitrust case against Microsoft, to represent the government. Bastian stressed: "We have a responsibility to protect the interests of shareholders, as well as the rights of customers and employees, including preventing them from suffering economic losses and protecting our brand and reputation from damage." (Xiaoxiao)