In response to CrowdStrike’s letter, Delta said that the airline had handled its reaction to the interruptions brought on by a defective update that was distributed to Microsoft Windows operating systems in mid-July improperly.
Attorney David Boies for Delta responds to Michael Carlinsky of CrowdStrike, stating that there is no evidence from the software company indicating the airline was accountable for the malfunctioning software that caused system crashes globally.
“When the disaster occurred, dedicated Delta employees across the company worked tirelessly to recover from the damage CrowdStrike had caused,” Boies states in the letter. “Their efforts were hindered by CrowdStrike’s failure to promptly provide an automatic solution or the information needed to facilitate those efforts.”
Boies makes a number of concerns in his letter, one of which is that CrowdStrike failed to demonstrate any urgency for the harm it did, and that its promises to help Delta came too late. According to Boies, CrowdStrike only directed Delta to its publicly accessible remediation website, which gave instructions on how to manually reboot each impacted system, in response to its offers of assistance during the first 65 hours of the outage.
Boies claims that when CrowdStrike eventually provided an allegedly automatic fix on Sunday, July 21 at 5:27 p.m. ET, it also introduced a second problem that stopped many workstations from recovering on their own.
Regarding George Kurtz, the CEO of CrowdStrike, offering to aid Delta CEO Ed Bastian, Boies notes that Kurtz made this untimely and ineffective assistance offer on July 22 in the evening.
