CrowdStrike outage to cost Delta $500 million, says CEO

ATLANTA

A global computer outage in July that stranded thousands of travelers will cost Delta Air Lines $500 million, the company's CEO Ed Bastian told CNBC.

Bastian added in an interview that the carrier would seek damages for the disruptions, saying: "We have no choice."

"We're looking to make certain that we get compensated however they decide to, for what they cost us," he said, referring to U.S. companies Microsoft and CrowdStrike.

CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity company that caused the outage, previously said that the breakdown stemmed from a problem in its test software.

The company said in an incident report that the glitch was pushed out to millions of computers running Microsoft's Windows software and that it will change the way it handles such updates in the future.

The incident has cost Delta "half a billion dollars" over five days, lost revenue, as well as tens of millions of dollars per day in compensation and hotels, said Bastian.

CrowdStrike said earlier this month that about 8.5 million devices were impacted by the outage, which hit a wide range of industries.

Users were faced with "blue screens of death" that made rebooting impossible with the airline industry visibly impacted by the crash.

Delta, which was said to have cancelled more than 5,000 flights, was particularly affected.

According to Bastian, it had to manually reset 40,000 servers.

"It's been a wakeup call for me because we have issues regularly in this space," he said.