At the end of July, CrowdStrike pushed an update that brought down computer systems all over the world. Airlines were badly affected, though none as significantly as Delta which displaced hundreds of thousands of passengers and cancelled a substantial portion of its flights for days on end.
Delta vs. United in Minneapolis. And I picked the wrong team, my friends. pic.twitter.com/1FibWqXiMC
— Brian Brenberg (@BrianBrenberg) July 22, 2024
For the last decade I’ve flown first class @Delta for every single flight.
Never again.
Y’all just lost a customer for life.
Horrible customer service. Cancelled flights with no reimbursement. No answers from anyone.
RIP, @Delta, you’re dead to me. pic.twitter.com/ln7AJAr0j1
— Jason Helmes (@anymanfitness) July 22, 2024
Delta had slimmed its IT operation, and after its systems collapsed it lost track of crew. While other airlines recovered, their systems continued to lag. While Delta is, in normal times, somewhat more reliable than most U.S. operations they have a history of taking longer to recover from meltdowns than other carriers.
- Throughout the ordeal and since, they’ve continued to deny any responsibility and blame CrowdStrike completely. But the incident tarnished Delta’s premium image.
- Rather than taking responsibility, this deflection has shown an arrogance that’s a real turnoff to many loyal customers. And it continues.
After Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg called Ed Bastian, ‘reminding him about his airline’s responsibilities to passengers’, the airline became more reasonable covering costs for stranded passengers. Delta had previously refused to pay for tickets that travelers were stuck buying on other airlines.
However, CEO Bastian has put Buttigieg on blast over this, claiming he was just posturing for self-serving political reasons.
“I got pretty annoyed with our Secretary of Transportation,” Bastian said, citing the department’s decision to deem disruptions stemming from the outage as “controllable.” That put airlines like Delta on the hook for covering additional costs like meals and transportation, among others.
“All that was just insane … Technology providers knock us out and then it’s our fault?” Bastian said. “You’ve got politicians running some of the cabinet offices there, and they’re doing it to make inroads and get name recognition.”
“You can imagine the conversation I had with him privately,” Bastian added to laughs.
It’s highly unusual for an airline CEO to publicly criticize its regulator. But Delta has a history of tremendous lobbying success, nearly blocking Mideast airlines from flying to the U.S. despite signed treaties (this effort culminated in an Oval Office meeting that Bastian failed to show up to), and as the airline’s CEO noted at the event where he called out Buttigieg, they’ve managed to retain their stranglehold on U.S. – Mexico flying via joint venture with Aeromexico despite DOT noticing that they intended to cancel it. As I’ve written in the past, in any 50-50 deal Delta takes the hyphen.
The irony of those that want to blame DL is that CRWD has yet to apologize directly to DL for the chaos it created around the world other than a very generic apology that also included “and our liability is capped at a small number of millions of dollars.”
THAT is the antithesis of taking responsibility – and it will cost CRWD far more than DL lost because of CRWD’s failures.
No IT company is going to put CRWD on anywhere close to the majority of their systems as DL did if any supplier can simply say that their liability for their mistakes is virtually nothing.
and DL has recovered from the CRWD effect while other airlines are STILL running worse operations year to date.
I get that some people want to keep anything going as long as they can but DL made the mistake of relying too heavily on CRWD – just like WN and UA relied too heavily on Boeing.
DL has recovered from its impact from CRWD; WN and UA will take years if they ever fully recover from Boeing’s incompetency.
Butt!gag was out of his depth the day he took the job. Was an identity politics hire from the get-go. Being the mayor of Notre Dame isn’t sufficient qualification for a cabinet post.