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Delta CEO Ed Bastian had some harsh words for Microsoft in the aftermath of last month's CrowdStrike crisis which, he says, cost his company over half a billion dollars.
The airline took the brunt of the damage, after a faulty update from the cyber security firm knocked Windows machines into the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). Whilst other airlines recovered after a couple of days, Delta was still cancelling flights five days later. In total, the airline had to cancel more than 5,000 flights and pay out compensation because, clearly, a lot of its systems run on Windows.
According to Bastian, the CrowdStrike fault affected 40,000 servers that “we had to physically touch and reset”.
While the CrowdStrike update wasn't inherently Microsoft's fault, Redmond has undoubtedly had to deal with blowback from the event. The company moved quickly to issue fixes and solutions that IT engineers could implement after the damage was done. But it also felt the need to shift blame and explain why Apple couldn't suffer the same fate — and it's to do with the European Union.
According to a Wall Street Journal report, a "Microsoft spokesman said it cannot legally wall off its operating system in the same way Apple does because of an understanding it reached with the European Commission following a complaint. In 2009, Microsoft agreed it would give makers of security software the same level of access to Windows that Microsoft gets."
In 2020, Apple informed developers that its macOS operating system would no longer grant them kernel-level access. This prevents a blue screen of death scenario from happening. Delta, meanwhile, faces a federal investigation on its failure to sufficiently deal with the outage.
More from Tom's Guide
- CrowdStrike global Windows crash latest updates — aftermath of the biggest IT outage in history
- What is CrowdStrike and what do they have to do with the global internet outage?
- Windows Blue Screen of Death hits millions in Microsoft and CrowdStrike outage — what you need to know
