After one catastrophic failure left millions of Microsoft customers with dreaded blue screens and canceled and delayed thousands of flights, Delta Airlines has reportedly hired a celebrity lawyer to seek compensation from CrowdStrike.
CNBC is reporting that Delta has hired attorney David Boies, 83, to represent the company in seeking damages after the July 19 CrowdStrike update caused widespread outages on Microsoft-run devices and internal problems at Delta.
Connected: Delta CEO Speaks Out on Flight Cancellations, CrowdStrike
The update specifically affected a crew tracking tool, which made it difficult for the airline to conduct business as usual, Delta CEO Ed Bastian said.
“While our initial efforts to stabilize operations were difficult and frustratingly slow and complex, we have made good progress this week and the worst impacts of the disruption caused by CrowdStrike are clearly behind us,” Bastian wrote in a memo last week. past.
Boies' law firm, Boies Schiller Flexner, has a list of high-profile former clients, including victims of Jeffrey Epstein, Theranos and Harvey Weinstein.
Connected: Read the memo from CrowdStrike explaining the massive IT disruption
Delta has not yet confirmed the CNBC report as of press time, but CNN says have received confirmation by a “person familiar with the decision”. Both Delta and Microsoft declined to comment to CNN.
Delta is estimated to have lost between $350 million and $500 million amid the outages that caused nearly 7,000 flights to be canceled and more than 176,000 customers disaffected.
Delta was down up 5.9% year over year as of Wednesday afternoon.