CrowdStrike is hitting back at Delta Air Lines, accusing the carrier of trying to blame the cybersecurity firm for its own response to last month’s devastating outage that resulted in thousands of canceled flights.
The technology company’s allegations came in a letter Sunday, with lawyers for CrowdStrike writing that Delta had rebuffed repeated offers of assistance, included one from its CEO George Kurtz to Ed Bastian, Delta’s chief executive.
“CrowdStrike’s CEO personally reached out to Delta’s CEO to offer onsite assistance, but received no response,” according to the letter, signed by Michael Carlinsky, co-managing partner of law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan.
Delta’s ensuing threat to sue CrowdStrike has added to a “misleading narrative” that the security software company is to blame for the carrier’s technology decisions and its reaction to the outage, the attorney wrote.
CrowdStrike hopes that Delta will “work cooperatively to find a resolution,” the company said in a separate email.
Delta declined to offer specific comment on the letter, but cited Bastian’s prior remarks to CNBC, in which the CEO said the airline had no choice other than to sue CrowdStrike to seek damages for the carrier’s outage-related losses. Bastian told CNBC the outage had cost Delta $500 million.
The airline last week hired the law firm of famed attorney David Boies to evaluate claims against CrowdStrike and Microsoft related to a CrowdStrike bug that disabled Microsoft programs, taking down Delta’s systems and creating chaos for travelers.
Delta is now under investigation by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Office of Aviation Consumer Protection. The Atlanta, Georgia-based carrier’s operations were hit the hardest hit among airlines.
CrowdStrike has blamed the failure of its Falcon security platform to an errors in a quality control tool that it uses to check system updates for mistakes. The update was distributed to more than 8 million devices around the world running Microsoft Windows, causing them to crash.
