The CrowdStrike global outage will cost Delta Air Lines $500 million, the company's CEO has said.
Delta's Ed Bastian told Squawk Box that the figure included lost revenue, as well as "the tens of millions of dollars per day in compensation and hotels."
Two weeks ago, cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike pushed out an update that caused blue screen of death error screens on millions of Windows systems.
Delta had to manually reset 40,000 servers, Bastian said. During this downtime, it canceled some 5,000 flights.
Other airlines were also disrupted - as were trains, banks, and healthcare providers - but Delta took far longer to recover. The CrowdStrike issue led to other problems arising, with Delta's IT systems unable to update with new flight changes.
The scale of the issue has led to the US Department of Transportation opening an investigation into Delta and its mass cancellation of flights.
Delta plans to seek compensation from CrowdStrike and Microsoft to cover at least some of the damages. “We have no choice," Bastian said.
He continued: “If you’re going to be having access, priority access to the Delta ecosystem in terms of technology, you’ve got to test the stuff. You can’t come into a mission-critical 24/7 operation and tell us we have a bug."
CrowdStrike has currently offered Delta no compensation - although it did give $10 in Uber Eats vouchers to partners.
The airline has hired attorney David Boies to make its case. Billions in insurance claims are expected around the world.