Delta Can Sue CrowdStrike Over Global Outage That Caused 7,000 Canceled Flights (reuters.com)
- Reference: 0177662419
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/05/20/1955255/delta-can-sue-crowdstrike-over-global-outage-that-caused-7000-canceled-flights
- Source link: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/delta-can-sue-crowdstrike-over-computer-outage-that-caused-7000-canceled-flights-2025-05-19/
> In a decision on Friday, Judge Kelly Lee Ellerbe of the Fulton County Superior Court said Delta can try to prove CrowdStrike was grossly negligent in pushing a defective update of its Falcon software to customers, crashing more than 8 million Microsoft Windows-based computers worldwide.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/delta-can-sue-crowdstrike-over-computer-outage-that-caused-7000-canceled-flights-2025-05-19/
Maybe they'll face some consequences now? (Score:3)
CRWD
July 16 2024: $337
Low Point, Aug 2 2024: $218
Feb 19 2025, new all-time-high: $450
Today: $442
To have the most public IT meltdown in recent memory that was caused by an admitted mistake by the company to only 6 months later hit an all time stock price and go on a 6 month rise in value.
Maybe they really turned it around their fundamentals in a ublic and transparent manner but really I think this speaks to something in terms of how we value what companies do and how to quantify that through the market.
If you're the C class at Crowdstrike you're not getting fired you're getting a big fat bonus check.
Re: (Score:2)
The rich getting richer at the expense of the masses.
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> The rich getting richer at the expense of the masses.
If you keep your mouth shut and toe the company line, someday you might be invited to be a corrupt c-level!
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It was a long time ago we saw the events of SQL Slammer, Melissa and other similar worms that were disruptive but at least mostly harmless. No ransomware or similar, just bugging IT crews.
Precidents (Score:3, Interesting)
If Delta ultimately wins based on its claims, that will have interesting consequences for enterprise software vendors (ESVs).
Even if it doesn't, ESVs will be reworking their EULAs and contracts to reflect that they can't be held liable for the performance of their software on
business operations. It'll be fun to watch the case progress and what the EULA terms limit Crowdstrike's liability.
IBM did lose a case to Lufkin Ind.. for $23m and this case is about 24 times that amount.
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You missed the part of Gross Negligence. You can't EULA-away (or even a formal contract) liability for gross negligence.
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Criminal Negligence sure, I don't think from an EULA perspective you can hold a vendor harmless.
Here's a boilerplate from a doc that I use:
> Indemnification and Limitation of Liability
> The End User agrees to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless [Software Company Name], its affiliates, officers, directors, employees, and agents from and against any claims, liabilities, damages, losses, and expenses, including reasonable attorney fees, arising out of or in any way connected with the use of the software. Under no circumstances shall [Software Company Name] be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, or consequential damages, including but not limited to loss of data, business interruption, or lost profits, even if advised of the possibility of such damages.
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I recall reading a Microsoft Excel EULA that said:
> Microsoft doesn't guarantee the software is fit for any particular purpose, including the one for which it was intended.
I never forgot that disclaimer. It was so true.
[1]The current Azure license [microsoft.com] states:
> THE SOFTWARE IS LICENSED “AS IS.” YOU BEAR THE RISK OF USING IT. MICROSOFT GIVES NO EXPRESS WARRANTIES, GUARANTEES, OR CONDITIONS. TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED UNDER APPLICABLE LAWS, MICROSOFT EXCLUDES ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING MERCHANTABILITY,
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/information-protection/software-license-terms
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This what you get when a grossly incompetent Enterprise Software Vendor shoves garbage out to millions of computers. Delta was only one customer of many affected.
GEORGIA document filing is a joke (Score:1)
Signed up on Fulton County Superior Court web search thing. Added credit card.
The original complain shows 0 pages, a cost of $0, and generated a
"Server Error in '/EPayments' Application with a long-ass stack trace.
Half the docket documents yield the same result.
If Reuters can't pull it up and the rest of can't pull it off. Well. What a peach.
E
Almost feel sorry for Delta's CIO (Score:2)
Delta is going to have to prove the impossible which is that the bulk of their damages were not self-inflicted. Everyone else in the world was up and running again in 24 hours ... except Delta. If this ever made it to a jury they will be tasked with weighing the relative incompetence of the two companies and through discovery CrowdStrike is going to be able to root around and find every embarrassing thing about Delta's IT org. Delta may be the plaintiff, but they aren't going to have that much to attack
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Did you just do math with the assumption that each plane is a private jet flying precisely one paying customer?
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The AC has successfully outed himself as an out of touch billionaire.
Re: Why? (Score:2)
Math? 7000 flights * number of passengers * ticket price? Plus the costs associated with fixing the mess made of all those people's travel plans, which likely includes a lot of hotel bills. You are likely looking at hundreds of millions in direct and indirect costs.
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Delta did pay for my group's meals and hotel rooms. That bill was more than the price of our tickets.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not simply the ticket costs, you have fuel, staff, overtime, customer payouts and make good flights (many of which likely are not full profitable flights as intended), gate fees (now you have to shuffle your entire fleet around off your schedule and airlines are extremely diligent about their scheduling, it's a scheduling business, every plane is expected to be in certain places at certain times) plus reputational damage.
Part of a lawsuit like this is the plaintiff has to (somewhat) justify the money it's asking and I am sure Delta's lawyers have all those points and financial statements and more in their briefing to the court.
Re: Why? (Score:2)
Part of the ticket costs go towards the fuel, workers, etc.
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Yeah and now you have to pay all those people more than they were originally supposed to, they had to deal with much of the work for the original flights, undoing those flights and redoing them. What are you saying?
Re: Why? (Score:2)
Is it really unfair reputational damage if they didn't have proper dev/prod testing of patches? Lol.....
Re:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
You missed x #passengers/flight. Assume 100. So now 7K flights x 2K/person x 100 persons/flight = 1.4B As to were they liable. Imagine if Boeing just shipped new plane types without bothering to test them. Its bad already. Imagine with no testing! That was crowdstrike, no testing, just ship it. I'm hoping they get hit hard. Software used to be used to add up spreadsheets and other fairly simple stuff that pretty much got verified. Over the decades, software has turned into what critical systems run on. Unfortunately the QA standards have gotten worse, which seems almost impossible, and yet here we are.