Last week, a report emerged about Delta Airlines working to file lawsuits against both CrowdStrike and Microsoft due to the issues that the company experienced as a result of last month"s faulty CrowdStrike update that affected millions of Windows PCs.
Today, The Verge is reporting that Microsoft is making a preemptive strike against a possible lawsuit. Company lawyers have sent a letter to Delta"s legal team, claiming that Microsoft tried to offer its assistance to help the airline recover from its issues but that those offers were either ignored or were turned down.
The letter stated in part:
Even though Microsoft’s software had not caused the CrowdStrike incident, Microsoft immediately jumped in and offered to assist Delta at no charge following the July 19th outage. Each day that followed from July 19th through July 23rd, Microsoft employees repeated their offers to help Delta. Each time, Delta turned down Microsoft’s offers to help, even though Microsoft would not have charged Delta for this assistance.
One communication in particular, sent by Microsoft to a Delta employee offering help with their issues on July 22, reportedly got this response back from a Delta employee: "All good. Cool will let you know and thank you.”
Even Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella emailed Delta CEO Ed Bastian about assisting the company, but Microsoft says Bastian never replied to Nadella. CrowdStrike"s CEO George Kurtz reportedly sent a similar letter to Bastian, but he did not respond to that communication.
Delta ended up canceling thousands of flights over several days after the initial CrowdStrike update on July 19. Bastion later claimed on CNBC that the incident cost Delta $500 million. He said the company would seek damages from CrowdStrike and Microsoft, adding, “We have no choice.” It would seem like both CrowdStrike and Microsoft are attempting to push their narrative of Delta being unwilling to accept their help.