Microsoft Responds to Delta's Claims, Disputes Arise
TapTechNews August 7th news, Microsoft responded to Delta Air Lines' previous accusations against Windows and CrowdStrike. Delta Air Lines' CEO Bastian once said that the company suffered a loss of about $500 million (TapTechNews note: currently about 3.577 billion yuan) due to the large-scale IT failure last month and planned to claim compensation from CrowdStrike and Microsoft. However, Microsoft claimed that Delta repeatedly refused its free assistance and even ignored the email from Microsoft CEO Nadella.
Chef, the global litigation business co-chair of Microsoft's law firm Dechert, said in a letter on behalf of Microsoft to Delta Air Lines' lawyer: Microsoft sympathizes with Delta Air Lines and its customers for the impact suffered due to the CrowdStrike incident, but your letter and Delta Air Lines' public remarks are incomplete, false, misleading and damaging to Microsoft and its reputation.
This letter aims to refute Bastian's remarks in an interview with CNBC last week. Bastian then said that the Microsoft system was vulnerable and said, Has Apple had such a large-scale failure recently? He also revealed that more than 40,000 servers of the company were affected by the incorrect update of CrowdStrike. But Microsoft's letter implies that Delta's problem may be far more than just a Windows server failure.
Chef said in the letter: Although Microsoft's software did not cause the CrowdStrike incident, after the failure occurred on July 19, Microsoft immediately intervened and actively offered to assist Delta for free. From July 19 to every day until July 23, Microsoft employees repeatedly offered to provide assistance, but Delta refused Microsoft's help every time, although Microsoft would not charge any fee for this.
Microsoft also claimed that on July 22, an employee contacted Delta Air Lines and expressed willingness to provide any help, but on the same day, an employee of Delta Air Lines replied that the situation was all good, and on that day, Delta Air Lines cancelled more than 1100 flights, and cancelled more than 500 flights the next day.
Chef wrote: Microsoft's senior management also extended a helping hand many times to help the corresponding personnel of Delta Air Lines, but the result was similar. Among them, on July 24 (Wednesday), Microsoft CEO Nadella sent an email to Delta Air Lines CEO Bastian, but did not get a reply.
Because Delta Air Lines is the official airline of the US Olympic team, Bastian may have been busy flying to the Paris Olympics at that time and missed Nadella's email. In the case of a large number of flight cancellations due to the CrowdStrike failure, Delta Air Lines had to urgently fulfill its commitment to the US team and send the athletes to Paris in time.
Microsoft believes that Delta Air Lines refused its free help because they were actually trying to restore non-Windows systems. It is increasingly obvious that Delta Air Lines may have refused Microsoft's help because its most difficult-to-recover IT system - the crew tracking and scheduling system - is serviced by other technology providers (such as IBM), because it runs on the systems of these providers, not Microsoft's Windows or Azure. It is written in Microsoft's letter.
This shows that Delta's Windows system was affected by the CrowdStrike failure, and these failures in turn affected the IT infrastructure serviced by companies such as IBM. Microsoft said that Delta Air Lines obviously did not modernize its IT infrastructure, so it was more affected by the CrowdStrike failure than competitors such as American Airlines or Unit ed Airlines.
Like CrowdStrike, Microsoft also requires Delta Air Lines to keep the documents related to the CrowdStrike failure. The company also hopes that this airline will keep all the information related to the failure of the crew tracking and scheduling system running on the hybrid platform of IBM, Oracle, Amazon Web Services, Kyndryl and other technologies. Microsoft said that if Delta Air Lines chooses to litigate, the company will definitely defend its rights and interests.
Earlier this week, CrowdStrike also claimed that it was not responsible for Delta's several days of outage and said that Delta also refused its on-site assistance.
Delta Air Lines is currently under investigation by the US Department of Transportation to understand the status of its handling of the recovery work.