Microsoft also claims that an employee contacted Delta on July 22nd to offer any help the airline needed, but a Delta employee replied that things were “all good” on the same day Delta canceled more than 1,100 flights, followed by 500 more cancellations the day after.
“More senior Microsoft executives also repeatedly reached out to help their counterparts at Delta, again with similar results,” writes Cheffo. “Among others, on Wednesday, July 24th, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella emailed Delta CEO Ed Bastian, who has never replied.”
Bastian may well have missed that email from Nadella because he was busy flying to the Olympic Games in Paris, as Delta is the official airline for Team USA. Among all the flight cancellations after the CrowdStrike outage, Delta had to scramble to fulfill its Team USA obligations to get athletes to Paris on time.
Microsoft thinks Delta refused its free help because it was actually struggling to restore non-Windows systems instead. “It is rapidly becoming apparent that Delta likely refused Microsoft’s help because the IT system it was most having trouble restoring its crew-tracking and scheduling system was being serviced by other technology providers, such as IBM, because it runs on those providers’ systems, and not Microsoft Windows or Azure,” says Microsoft’s letter.
That suggests that Delta was hit by the CrowdStrike outage on its Windows systems and that those failures then impacted its IT infrastructure that was serviced by IBM and others. Microsoft says Delta “apparently has not modernized its IT infrastructure,” so it was more impacted by the CrowdStrike outage than rivals like American Airlines or United Airlines.
