Microsoft fires back at Delta after outage, says airline declined help

Microsoft fired back at Delta Air Lines on Tuesday accusing the carrier of not modernizing its technology before it canceled 1000’s of flights within the wake of last month’s global massive IT outage.

Delta CEO Ed Bastian told CNBC last week that the carrier has “no alternative” but to hunt damages from Microsoft and CrowdStrike for the mass disruptions, which he said cost the corporate, an airline that prides itself on reliability, about $500 million.

Delta struggled greater than rival airlines to recuperate from the outage, canceling greater than 5,000 flights in the times following the July 19 incident, which was sparked by a botched software update from CrowdStrike and affected tens of millions of computers running Microsoft Windows.

Mark Cheffo, a Dechert partner representing Microsoft, said in a letter Tuesday to Delta’s attorney David Boies of Boies Schiller Flexner, said Microsoft remains to be attempting to work out why American Airlines, United Airlines and others were capable of recuperate more quickly than Delta.

“Our preliminary review suggests that Delta, unlike its competitors, apparently has not modernized its IT infrastructure, either for the advantage of its customers or for its pilots and flight attendants,” Cheffo wrote.

Delta responded on Tuesday that it has “a protracted track record of investing in protected, reliable and elevated service for our customers and employees.

“Since 2016, Delta has invested billions of dollars in IT capital expenditures, along with the billions spent annually in IT operating costs,” Delta said in response to the Tuesday letter from Microsoft,” the airline said in an announcement.

In a July 29 letter, Boies told Microsoft’s chief legal officer, Hossein Nowbar: “Now we have reason to consider Microsoft has did not comply with contractual requirements and otherwise acted in a grossly negligent, indeed willful, manner in reference to the Faulty Update” from CrowdStrike that caused Windows computers to crash, Boies told Microsoft’s chief legal officer, Hossein Nowbar, in a letter dated July 29.

Microsoft lawyer Cheffo wrote in his response that the corporate empathizes with Delta and its customers on the impact of the CrowdStrike incident. “But your letter and Delta’s public comments are incomplete, false, misleading, and damaging to Microsoft and its fame,” he said.

Microsoft’s letter followed the same one from CrowdStrike on Sunday rejecting claims from the Atlanta-based airline. Cheffo wrote that Microsoft offered to assist Delta without spending a dime. Every day from July 19 to July 23, Microsoft employees said they may help, but Delta turned them away, based on the letter.

Delta CEO Bastian told CNBC’s Squawk Box” that CrowdStrike didn’t offer any financial compensation but did extend “free consulting advice” on coping with the fallout from the outage. 

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella emailed Bastian, “who has never replied,” Cheffo wrote Tuesday. CrowdStrike also said its CEO George Kurtz had reached out to his counterpart at Delta “but received no response.”

Cheffo described a letter on July 22, from Microsoft to a Delta worker, offering help. The Delta worker wrote back: “All good. Cool will let you understand and thanks.”

Delta executives said the outage, which led to more cancellations than in all of 2019, overwhelmed its crew-scheduling platform that matches crews to flights. But Cheffo said Delta doesn’t depend on Windows or Microsoft’s Azure cloud services.

In 2021, IBM announced a multiyear deal with Delta to assist it implement a hybrid-cloud architecture running on Red Hat’s OpenShift software. In 2022, Amazon said Delta had picked the digital commerce company’s Amazon Web Services unit to be its preferred cloud provider.

“It’s rapidly becoming apparent that Delta likely refused Microsoft’s help since the IT system it was most having trouble restoring — its crew-tracking and scheduling system — was being serviced by other technology providers, equivalent to IBM, since it runs on those providers’ systems, and never Microsoft Windows or Azure,” Cheffo wrote in his letter.

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

Microsoft demands that Delta retain records showing how much technologies from IBM, Amazon and others contributed to the airline’s issues from July 19 to July 24, Cheffo wrote. Spokespeople for IBM and Amazon didn’t immediately provide comment.

Bastian told CNBC last week, “When you’re going to be having access, priority access, to the Delta ecosystem when it comes to technology, you’ve to check these things. You may’t come right into a mission critical 24/7 operation and tell us now we have a bug. It doesn’t work.”