Delta passengers file class-action lawsuit against airline over CrowdStrike tech outage

Delta Air Lines passengers whose flights were affected by the CrowdStrike tech outage last month filed a lawsuit against the airline this week over its alleged failure to quickly restore flight operations. 

Delta canceled thousands of flights in the days following the July 19 outage, with its woes dragging on for much longer than other airlines'. 

On July 22, Delta canceled more than 1,250 flights — far more than any other airline and accounting for roughly 70% of all flights within, into or from the U.S., according to flight-tracking website FlightAware. Even Delta CEO Ed Bastian himself acknowledged in a memo that the airline's efforts to restore operations "were difficult and frustratingly slow and complex." The chaos at Delta only eased six days after the outage, whereas other airlines were operating normally again within a couple of days. 

The lawsuit, filed by Sauder Schelkopf and Webb, Klase & Lemond on behalf of Delta passengers whose flights were canceled, alleges that "no other U.S. airline had canceled one-tenth as many flights."

It also claims Delta failed to properly compensate passengers for the scheduling snarls by awarding them automatic refunds for canceled flights. Instead the airline offered only partial reimbursements and asked passengers so sign waivers releasing Delta of all legal claims against it, according to the lawsuit filed Tuesday in a district court in Atlanta. 

"While nearly every other airline recovered quickly from the July 19th 'Tech Outage,' Delta's passengers remained stranded, waiting in lines for days trying to get to their destinations. When our clients sought refunds, Delta again failed to deliver. We look forward to litigating the case on their behalf," Joe Sauder of Sauder Schelkopf, an attorney for the passengers, said in a statement. 

Many airlines rely on Microsoft's Office365 for scheduling purposes, including getting crews and passengers and their luggage to the right places. The CrowdStrike outage crashed these systems, forcing airlines to resort to manual scheduling. Delta attributed its own delay in restoring operations to its "disproportionate reliance on Windows software" according to the lawsuit. Because it couldn't schedule flight crews easily, it wasn't able to assign pilots and flight attendants to planes.

Delta, meanwhile, has hired famed attorney David Boies' law firm to pursue damages from the CrowdStrike outage that grounded flights. CrowdStrike hit back, saying it isn't at fault, and accused the carrier of trying to blame the cybersecurity firm for its own response to the outage.