It was inevitable that lawsuits might be filed due to the outage of millions of Windows PCs earlier in July from a faulty security update from CrowdStrike. One of the many major companies affected by the outage was Delta Airlines. Today, there's word that the company has hired a well-known attorney to help prepare for lawsuits against both CrowdStrike and Microsoft.
CNBC reports, via unnamed sources, that Delta has hired David Boies to get its lawsuits ready against the two companies. Boies has some experience with dealing with Microsoft. He helped lead the US government's case anti-trust case against the company in 2001 over Microsoft's use of Internet Explorer bundled inside Windows.
Delta has yet to officially comment on the hiring of Boies or any plans to launch a court case against Microsoft or CrowdStrike. The airline canceled thousands of flights over the weekend of July 19 due to its Windows PCs being hit with the botched CrowdStrike update.
CNBC's report claims the monetary damages caused by all those flights being canceled could be between $350 million and $500 million. It added that the airline has had to offer 176,000 refunds or other kinds of reimbursements to its customers for those canceled flights. One estimate claims that over $15 billion in monetary damages were created by the CrowdStrike outage worldwide among all the businesses that were affected.
CrowdStrike's CEO George Kurtz quickly apologized publicly for the faulty security update just hours after it was released on July 19. Both CrowdStrike and Microsoft worked with their customers to bring the Windows PCs affected by the update back online. Late last week, Kurtz announced that over 97 percent of the Windows sensors that were hit by the outage were back online but vowed that the company would keep working to get all those PCs back online.
CrowdStrike made a feeble attempt to compensate the IT admins who were working to restore PCs affected by the update by sending them a $10 Uber Eats digital discount code. That code ended up being pulled from some people who received it.
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