Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said the recent global technology outage caused the airline to experience widespread flight delays and cancellations, costing the company $500 million.
“This cost $500 million,” Bastian said Wednesday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
“Over the course of five days, we lost tens of millions of dollars a day in lost revenue, as well as compensation and hotel costs, and we worked hard to accommodate our customers during that time,” Bastian said.
While multiple airlines were experiencing technical issues when the outage occurred on July 19, Delta Air Lines faced mass cancellations over the next few days.
The mass cancellations have prompted an investigation by the Department of Transportation, with Secretary Pete Buttigieg saying officials are looking to ensure Delta is “complying with the law and keeping our customers safe.”
The global outage was linked to an update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike that crashed computers running Windows software. The company quickly rolled out a fix, but it took a long time for affected customers to get their systems back up and running.
Thousands of Delta flights were canceled or delayed in the days following the outage.
Asked Wednesday about the possibility of filing a lawsuit over the blackouts, Bastian told CNBC that “we have no other choice.”
“If you want priority access to the Delta ecosystem on the technology side, you have to test this stuff. You can’t go into a mission-critical operation that runs 24/7 and say, ‘We have a bug,'” he said. “That doesn’t work.”
In an emailed statement to The Hill, a CrowdStrike spokesperson said the company was “aware of the reports but is unaware of the lawsuit and has no further comment.”
Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
delta Announced On July 24, the airline announced that no major flights had been canceled and operations had returned to almost full normal.
Update: 3:03 p.m.
