CrowdStrike rolled out an update earlier this month that caused an estimated 8.5 million Windows machines to crash worldwide. The outage affected many forms of infrastructure, particularly airlines that were unable to access systems that were caught in infinite blue screen of death boot loops.
The severity of the outage in terms of loss of revenue has yet to be measured exactly, but last week, it was estimated by Parametrix, a cloud monitoring and insurance company, the CrowdStrike outage loss of revenue globally is approximately $15 billion. Out of that $15 billion, Parametrix estimated airlines lost $860 million, which they will likely want returned to them if it were legally possible. Furthermore, the insurance company estimated $5.4 billion was lost from Fortune 500 companies, not including Microsoft.
Delta is the first to seek damages for the event as reports indicate the company has hired prominent attorney David Boies, the chairman of the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner, who rose to fame for his role in the landmark case the US government won against Microsoft, his participating in overturning California's ban on gay marriage, and his work with Harvey Weinstein, the now imprisoned Hollywood producer.
Delta hasn't filed anything but is seeking damages from CrowdStrike and Microsoft, which reports state cost the airline anywhere between $350 million to $500 million. Delta canceled nearly 7,000 flights and is processing or has already processed an estimated 176,000 refund requests.