Delta Air Lines vs. CrowdStrike: How The Airline Was Crippled By A Software Bug

Well, it looks like the dust has mostly settled in the dispute between Delta Air Lines and IT company CrowdStrike. This allows us to give a fairly comprehensive summary of everything that happened.

As you may remember, CrowdStrike’s erroneous software update in July caused a near-global level of disruption impacting many airlines, hospitals, and emergency response systems. All in all, Forbes notes that about 8.5 million Windows devices were affected. For Delta Air Lines, disruptions resulted in the cancellation of about 7,000 flights over five days!

And so for today’s video let’s examine everything that happened to Delta as a result of the CrowdStrike event, why the carrier was hit harder than other airlines, and the damages incurred.

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[global]

I flew out of ATL on Alaska Airlines that day. No wait to taxi since all the Delta flights were grounded - we got in early!

[soccerguy]

It should be mentioned that friday was Delta's busiest day of the year

[NotAJosh]

I think more than anything this should open up folks eyes on how few company’s can cause chaos around the world.. Just imagine if cloudflare ever had an outage %16 percent of the internet disrupted by one company

[jfmezei]

Crowdstrike software runs in kernel mode, which means that when it tries to execute illegal instruction, access non existent memory or even divide by 0, the system cannot intercept this and kill only that process, the whole system goes down. And since the software starts early in the bot process, it would crash eveytime it booted.
The flaw here is that the kernel mode software accepted unverified data from the internet without a user level software parsing it for validity before passing it to the kernel level software. This ia a bad design from Crowdsrike and bad decision from Delta for rellying on sofware from a company that doesn't know about basic precautions for kernel mode code.
Each machine had to be rebooted with equivalent of special keypresses to avoid loading extensions after which you coudl delete the offending file and reboot normally. (this was documented early during the night by Crowdstrike). Remains to be seen if Delta IT staff were at work fixing the problem as soon as the fix was docuented or whether the fix started during regular work hours.

[Toby-ee]

My flight got cancelled twice during this.

[Andrerc]

Crowdstrike compensations to Delta are due

[michaeloreilly]

Pity they didn't go to court.
It would have made an extremely interesting video for the channel.

[soccerguy]

Delta protects more devices with crowdstrike than American or United.
Furthermore, Crowdstike cant help manually reboot computers in person anyways.

[philip]

The old console based scheduling system is probably the root cause of the cascading disruption. Most other airlines probably had a browser based application where they just needed a browser and VPN.

[alexschwager]

the real villian in this are the hotel raising their prices

[yunuscurrie]

We got delayed 4 hours but we flew faster in probably a jetstream and arrived only 30 minutes delayed

[Silent_Shishya]

Oh i was very happy about the Crowdstrike bug which locked out my office laptop. Got paid for doing nothing all day

[charleshamilton]

My takeaway from this utterly preventable and foreseeable calamity? Delta’s garbage CEO complains bitterly regarding Cloudstrike’s indifference is only matched by Delta’s passengers complaint bitterly about the airline’s indifference. Did I mention this was preventable?