Delta CEO Ed Bastian had some harsh words for Microsoft in the aftermath of last month's CrowdStrike crisis which, he says, cost his company over half a billion dollars.
The airline took the brunt of the damage, after a faulty update from the cyber security firm knocked Windows machines into the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). Whilst other airlines recovered after a couple of days, Delta was still cancelling flights five days later. In total, the airline had to cancel more than 5,000 flights and pay out compensation because, clearly, a lot of its systems run on Windows.
"Delta has a significant number of applications that use that system, and in particular one of our crew tracking-related tools was affected and unable to effectively process the unprecedented number of changes triggered by the system shutdown," Bastian wrote at the time.
Asked during an interview with CNBC this week about his feelings on Microsoft after the July 19th outage, Bastian didn't pull punches. He described Windows as being "probably the most fragile platform" and queried, "When was the last time you heard of a big outage at Apple?"
According to Bastian, the CrowdStrike fault affected 40,000 servers that “we had to physically touch and reset”.
While the CrowdStrike update wasn't inherently Microsoft's fault, Redmond has undoubtedly had to deal with blowback from the event. The company moved quickly to issue fixes and solutions that IT engineers could implement after the damage was done. But it also felt the need to shift blame and explain why Apple couldn't suffer the same fate — and it's to do with the European Union.
According to a Wall Street Journal report, a "Microsoft spokesman said it cannot legally wall off its operating system in the same way Apple does because of an understanding it reached with the European Commission following a complaint. In 2009, Microsoft agreed it would give makers of security software the same level of access to Windows that Microsoft gets."
In 2020, Apple informed developers that its macOS operating system would no longer grant them kernel-level access. This prevents a blue screen of death scenario from happening. Delta, meanwhile, faces a federal investigation on its failure to sufficiently deal with the outage.
