According to Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian, the airline is facing costs of $500 million related to a global technical outage this month, disrupting emergency services, communications and thousands of businesses.
Bastian said in an interview with CNBC on Wednesday that the amount of money represents both the loss of revenue and “tens of millions of dollars a day in compensation and hotels” for the five-day period.
A week ago, CrowdStrike blamed a bug in an update that allowed its cybersecurity systems to send bad data to millions of customer computers, causing the global technical outage causing flights to be grounded, TV broadcasts to be halted and banks, hospitals and shops to be disrupted.
Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike also detailed what measures it will take to prevent the issue from happening again, including phasing out updates, giving customers more control over when and where updates are delivered, and providing more information about the updates the company is planning.
Among the airlines, Delta was by far the hardest hit by the outage. Thousands of flights had to be cancelled because key systems were disabled by the incident.
The U.S. Department of Transportation is investigating why Delta not recovered just as fast as other airlines. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said last week that the department would also investigate Delta Customer Serviceincluding “unacceptable” queues for assistance and reports of unaccompanied minors being stranded at airports.
Bastian said on CNBC that Delta will seek damages for the disruptions. CrowdStrike has not made any offers to help Delta financially, he added. It has offered free consulting.