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The legal battle between Delta Air Lines and CrowdStrike may only be just getting started.
Delta's attorney David Boies sent a letter to the cybersecurity firm Thursday, rejecting CrowdStrike's apology and its response to Delta's threat of litigation over the global IT outage where a flawed CrowdStrike update crashed millions of computers last month, causing airlines to delay and cancel thousands of flights.
Delta, in particular, cancelled roughly 7,000 flights in five days in the immediate wake of the crash, according to a disclosure the airline filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission this week. After the IT crash, Delta struggled to get its operations back up and running as quickly as other airlines. Now, the airline is shedding more light on why this might have occurred.
"Approximately 60 percent of Delta's mission-critical applications and their associated data—including Delta's redundant backup systems—depend on the Microsoft Windows operating system and CrowdStrike," Boies writes, adding: "Delta's reliance on CrowdStrike and Microsoft actually exacerbated its experience in the CrowdStrike-caused disaster."
Delta also struggled to fully restore its systems as quickly as it would have liked because some of its impacted IT systems exist in "secure airport areas requiring government-mandated access clearance" and required manual fixes. Ultimately, Delta's attorney argues that CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz's offer of help was too little, too late.
"When made—almost four days after the CrowdStrike disaster began—Delta had already restored its critical systems and most other machines," Boies says.
Earlier this week, CrowdStrike denied Delta's allegations of negligence and claimed that Delta ignored or rejected its help in the immediate aftermath of the crash. Microsoft also chimed in on the situation, suggesting its own investigation showed Delta may not have "modernized" its IT infrastructure and that some Delta systems were using IBM machines that did not run on Windows. Delta has not directly responded to the IBM claims, but has repeatedly said that it's poured "billions of dollars" into its computer systems.
While CrowdStrike has already published technical reports detailing how it believes the incident occurred, Delta wants to know more. "I would hope that CrowdStrike would immediately share everything it knows. It will all come out in litigation anyway," Boies writes, further underscoring that a lawsuit may be on the immediate horizon.
PCMag has reached out to CrowdStrike for comment.