$500 million in five days. That is the cost that Delta Airlines had to bear due to the botched CrowdStrike software update that took thousands of Microsoft systems around the world offline according to Delta’s CEO Ed Bastian. The airline was forced to cancel more than 5,000 flights in the wake of the outage.

Delta has now hired prominent attorney David Boies to seek damages from both CrowdStrike and Microsoft. Boies represented the U.S. government in its landmark antitrust case against Microsoft. “We have no choice,” said Bastian. “If you’re going to be having access, priority access to the Delta ecosystem in terms of technology, you’ve got to test the stuff. You can’t come into a mission-critical 24/7 operation and tell us we have a bug.” Apart from the cancellation reimbursements, hotel costs, and the fact that the company had to manually reset 40,000 servers, Delta is going after damages to its brand and reputation. Read more about this story on our LinkedIn page