American airline Delta is demanding $500 million in damages after a serious IT error in CrowdStrike software.

American airline Delta is accusing CrowdStrike of breach of contract and negligence after an outage crippled more than eight million computers worldwide and led to 7,000 canceled Delta flights. The company is seeking $500 million in damages, CNCB understands.

Broken software update error

The outage caused Delta to lose $380 million in revenue and costs increased to $170 million. The airline is suing both CrowdStrike and Microsoft in a lawsuit filed in the US state of Georgia. Delta claims the software update was not tested thoroughly enough. CrowdStrike’s automatic updates were preemptively disabled, but the update still went through, which Delta says is only possible via an unauthorized backdoor in Windows.

In a response, CrowdStrike says these claims are false. “They are based on false information and this indicates a lack of understanding of modern cybersecurity. “This is nothing more than a desperate attempt to avoid blaming their aging IT infrastructure,” a CrowdStrike spokesperson said.

CrowdStrike’s automated testing process allowed the update to roll out in July, but missed a logic error that caused system crashes. Microsoft then released a recovery tool for affected Windows PCs and spoke with security industry partners to prevent such fiascos in the future.