CrowdStrike outage disrupted thousands of Delta flights. Now, it wants compensation

CrowdStrike outage affected critical businesses, such as airlines, hospitals, supermarkets, airports, and even TV stations. Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines is now looking to pursue damages from both CrowdStrike and Microsoft from such an outage that affected a total of 8.5 million computers and caused widespread flight cancellations.

The company (via CNBC) has enlisted renowned attorney David Boies for the legal proceeding, as per though no formal lawsuit has yet been filed. The incident caused a significant loss for the airline, which analysts have estimated between $350 million and $500 million.

Despite other companies recovering, Delta Air Lines’ recovery is slow due to issues with a crucial Windows-based crew-tracking tool.

Boies is known for leading the US government’s successful antitrust against Microsoft back in 2001. The Redmond tech giant was accused of monopolizing the web browser market by restricting the removal of Internet Explorer.

The initial ruling found Microsoft guilty, but the decision was partly overturned on appeal, leading to a settlement with Microsoft agreeing to change its business practices.

As CrowdStrike and Microsoft explained, the “worst IT outage in history” was caused by a faulty update to CrowdStrike’s CSagent.sys driver, leading to memory access violations and system boot loops. Then, it resulted in a significant number of Windows PCs experiencing Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) issues.

Microsoft is now considering limiting third-party access to the Windows kernel to prevent future problems and is also pushing for improved security measures and resiliency in Windows systems.