Microsoft says Delta ignored Satya Nadella’s offer of CrowdStrike help

Microsoft has responded to Delta Air Lines’ disapproval of Windows and CrowdStrike aft the elephantine IT outage past month. Delta CEO Ed Bastian wants compensation from some CrowdStrike and Microsoft for the estimated $500 cardinal Delta mislaid owed to the outage. Now, Microsoft says Delta refused its escaped assistance connected aggregate occasions and adjacent ignored an email from CEO Satya Nadella to Bastian.

“Microsoft empathizes with Delta and its customers regarding the interaction of the CrowdStrike incident. But your missive and Delta’s nationalist comments are incomplete, false, misleading, and damaging to Microsoft and its reputation,” says Mark Cheffo, co-chair of Dechert’s planetary litigation practice, successful a missive connected behalf of Microsoft to Delta’s lawyers.

The letter, embedded below, aims to overgarment a precise antithetic representation of the incidental pursuing Bastian’s comments successful an interview with CNBC last week. Bastian called Microsoft fragile and asked, “When was the past clip you heard of a large outage astatine Apple?” He besides revealed that much than 40,000 of the company’s servers had been deed by CrowdStrike’s faulty update. Microsoft’s missive suggests that Delta’s problems mightiness tally a batch deeper than its Windows server outage, though.

“Even though Microsoft’s bundle had not caused the CrowdStrike incident, Microsoft instantly jumped successful and offered to assistance Delta astatine nary complaint pursuing the July 19th outage,” says the missive from Cheffo. “Each time that followed from July 19th done July 23rd, Microsoft employees repeated their offers to assistance Delta. Each time, Delta turned down Microsoft’s offers to help, adjacent though Microsoft would not person charged Delta for this assistance.”

Microsoft besides claims that an worker contacted Delta connected July 22nd to connection immoderate assistance the hose needed, but a Delta worker replied that things were “all good” connected the aforesaid time Delta canceled much than 1,100 flights, followed by 500 much cancellations the time after.

“More elder Microsoft executives besides repeatedly reached retired to assistance their counterparts astatine Delta, again with akin results,” writes Cheffo. “Among others, connected Wednesday, July 24th, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella emailed Delta CEO Ed Bastian, who has ne'er replied.”

Bastian whitethorn good person missed that email from Nadella due to the fact that helium was engaged flying to the Olympic Games successful Paris, arsenic Delta is the authoritative hose for Team USA. Among each the formation cancellations aft the CrowdStrike outage, Delta had to scramble to fulfill its Team USA obligations to get athletes to Paris connected time.

Microsoft thinks Delta refused its escaped assistance due to the fact that it was really struggling to reconstruct non-Windows systems instead. “It is rapidly becoming evident that Delta apt refused Microsoft’s assistance due to the fact that the IT strategy it was astir having occupation restoring — its crew-tracking and scheduling strategy — was being serviced by different exertion providers, specified arsenic IBM, due to the fact that it runs connected those providers’ systems, and not Microsoft Windows oregon Azure,” says Microsoft’s letter. 

That suggests that Delta was deed by the CrowdStrike outage connected its Windows systems and that those failures past impacted its IT infrastructure that was serviced by IBM and others. Microsoft says Delta “apparently has not modernized its IT infrastructure,” truthful it was much impacted by the CrowdStrike outage than rivals similar American Airlines oregon United Airlines.

Like CrowdStrike, Microsoft is besides asking Delta to sphere documents related to the CrowdStrike outage. It besides wants the hose to support thing related to the outage of its crew-tracking and scheduling systems that tally connected a substance of IBM, Oracle, Amazon Web Services, Kyndryl, and different technologies. Microsoft says it volition “vigorously support itself successful immoderate litigation if Delta chooses to prosecute that path.”

Earlier this week, CrowdStrike besides claimed it’s not to blame for Delta’s days-long outage and said Delta besides declined its on-site assistance. CrowdStrike’s comments present marque much consciousness aft Microsoft’s proposition that the problems astatine Delta could tally a batch deeper than its Windows systems being taken down by the faulty CrowdStrike update. Unlike different airlines, Delta struggled to get systems backmost online and is presently being investigated by the US Department of Transportation over its handling of betterment efforts.