Global tech outage cost Delta airlines nearly half a billion dollars, CEO says

Delta CEO Ed Bastian revealed on Wednesday that the recent global tech outage had cost his company $500 million, after it brought airport, bank and hospital systems to a halt.

Earlier this month, the one day outage, caused by an update from CrowdStrike that crashed computers running Windows software, hit airports especially hard as it forced thousands of flight delays and cancellations. But Delta also saw a surge in cancellations in the days after the outage.

Bastian said that his company did everything it could to help its customers after the outage, but it experienced a big enough loss that they have "no choice" but to sue CrowdStrike over the incident.

“If you’re gonna be having access, priority access, to the Delta ecosystem in terms of technology, you’ve gotta test this stuff, you gotta… you can’t come into a mission-critical, 24/7 operation and tell us, ‘We have a bug,’” Bastian told CNBC's Squawk Box. “That doesn’t work.”

The Delta CEO claimed that his company spent five days working with customers to book hotels, and compensate the travelers on the cancellation fees and rebooking them on different flights.

"We did everything we could to take care of our customers over that time frame,” Bastian said.

The outage forced the airline to cancel over 5,000 flights between July 19 and July 25. Delta also had problems with the new changes to the CrowdStrike software, which led to further delays.

The recent scandal for Delta has also resulted in an investigation from the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Misty Severi is an evening news reporter for Just The News. You can follow her on X for more coverage.