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$5.4B seems way too low given the number of flights Delta cancelled and will be on the hook to refund. https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2024/07/23

$5.4B seems way too low given the number of flights Delta cancelled and will be on the hook to refund. https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2024/07/23/delta-flight-cancellations-dot-investigation-crowdstrike-outage/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2024/07/23/del...

gruez 2y ago
Delta's revenue is only $58.05 billion in 20213. I'm not sure how a day or two of canceled flights is going to be anywhere near $5.4B.
- hysan 2y ago
  Delta only started to recover today, so it’s more like 4-5 days of canceled flights. Not saying it’s a huge difference but 1-2 greatly underplays how bad it was for people flying Delta vs any other airline.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - Khaine 2y ago
    Most of that was due to knock on impacts. The Delta scheduling software couldn’t handle the number of changes that were being to staff schedules, and routes, and flights due to the impacts of the CrowdStrike outage.
- magic_man 2y ago
  Way more than delta flights were grounded. If you include all the hours lost by all those people and assign some monetary value it's probably more than that. Not only that, but all the hospitals. God forbid someone died because of it. Surprised crowd strike isn't bankrupt
  - red-iron-pine 2y ago
    the hospitals alone are reasons to excoriate CS, airlines notwithstanding
- jvanderbot 2y ago
  Crowdstrike's impact was more than Delta's cancelled flights? How did you arrive at the conclusion it was limited to Delta? Even still, Delta had a really bad time recovering, and is still cancelling flights days later. It's not just "a day or two". At a billion a week, with 30-40% cancellation rates, that's 300-400M just for this one customer. And that's just lost revenue. Imagine the extra costs: customer service complaints, hardware / IT restoration, extra wages for flight attendants working double duty to keep the remaining flights going. Madness. Even just in travel segment, how many hotels, car rentals, uber/lyft rides, etc were cancelled b/c of missed flights? How much do you think they paid on top of the lost revenue to handle customer complaints, IT restoration, etc? The repair costs alone at a given airport must be staggering, as every terminal screen is BSOD and needs a tech to manually restore from bitlocker. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/delta-flight-cancellations-today-dot-investigation-crowdstrike-outage/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/delta-flight-cancellations-toda...
  - gruez 2y ago
    Well the comment I replied to didn't event try to quantify the total impact, and only mentioned delta flights being canceled. There might be a bazillion other ways it can add up to $5.4B, but "flights Delta cancelled and will be on the hook to refund" does not come anywhere close to justifying that number.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- moralestapia 2y ago
  It's more like a week of downtime which totals to about a billion based on the data you brought in. So, just one of the affected companies brings the total to $1B, wouldn't you say $5B is actually a low estimate?
jjav 2y ago
I would like to live in a world where crowdstrike is directly liable for every dollar lost and has to pay for all of it. Only then would these companies start to take quality seriously. Of course in our real world, they are unlikely to pay anything at all and just continue operating as-is.
- ghostly_s 2y ago
  It's absolutely ludicrous the US airline industry still has no contingency plan for "a bad software update is pushed by a vendor to our Windows systems."
  - SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
    If the computers in a computer reliant massively distributed organization go down, what's the alternative?
    - ThunderSizzle 2y ago
      Computers shouldn't auto update. Updates need to be scheduled and monitored and tested.
      - lazide 2y ago
        Every CTO’s easy answer - cool, we’ll just only do them once every 5 years then. With modern tech stacks, we’re talking hundreds of updates a quarter. If not more.
        cozzyd 2y ago
        Sounds like they shouldn't be using those tech sticks then.
      - paulmd 2y ago
        That was the defacto state of things up until windows 10 moved to a forced update model. In that world we regularly had massive malware waves and resultant massive botnets constantly disrupting critical infrastructure. We moved away from that for a reason. And the real fix is to make updates not take down the whole system. When was the last time every Linux system in the world was unable to boot all at the same time? Even the crowdstrike issue only took down a very limited subset of installs and the blast radius is far more minimal due to the linux kernel being a lot more sane and cautious.

gruez 2y ago

Delta's revenue is only $58.05 billion in 20213. I'm not sure how a day or two of canceled flights is going to be anywhere near $5.4B.

hysan 2y ago
Delta only started to recover today, so it’s more like 4-5 days of canceled flights. Not saying it’s a huge difference but 1-2 greatly underplays how bad it was for people flying Delta vs any other airline.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Khaine 2y ago
  Most of that was due to knock on impacts. The Delta scheduling software couldn’t handle the number of changes that were being to staff schedules, and routes, and flights due to the impacts of the CrowdStrike outage.
magic_man 2y ago
Way more than delta flights were grounded. If you include all the hours lost by all those people and assign some monetary value it's probably more than that. Not only that, but all the hospitals. God forbid someone died because of it. Surprised crowd strike isn't bankrupt
- red-iron-pine 2y ago
  the hospitals alone are reasons to excoriate CS, airlines notwithstanding
jvanderbot 2y ago
Crowdstrike's impact was more than Delta's cancelled flights? How did you arrive at the conclusion it was limited to Delta? Even still, Delta had a really bad time recovering, and is still cancelling flights days later. It's not just "a day or two". At a billion a week, with 30-40% cancellation rates, that's 300-400M just for this one customer. And that's just lost revenue. Imagine the extra costs: customer service complaints, hardware / IT restoration, extra wages for flight attendants working double duty to keep the remaining flights going. Madness. Even just in travel segment, how many hotels, car rentals, uber/lyft rides, etc were cancelled b/c of missed flights? How much do you think they paid on top of the lost revenue to handle customer complaints, IT restoration, etc? The repair costs alone at a given airport must be staggering, as every terminal screen is BSOD and needs a tech to manually restore from bitlocker. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/delta-flight-cancellations-today-dot-investigation-crowdstrike-outage/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/delta-flight-cancellations-toda...
- gruez 2y ago
  Well the comment I replied to didn't event try to quantify the total impact, and only mentioned delta flights being canceled. There might be a bazillion other ways it can add up to $5.4B, but "flights Delta cancelled and will be on the hook to refund" does not come anywhere close to justifying that number.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
moralestapia 2y ago
It's more like a week of downtime which totals to about a billion based on the data you brought in. So, just one of the affected companies brings the total to $1B, wouldn't you say $5B is actually a low estimate?

jjav 2y ago

I would like to live in a world where crowdstrike is directly liable for every dollar lost and has to pay for all of it. Only then would these companies start to take quality seriously. Of course in our real world, they are unlikely to pay anything at all and just continue operating as-is.

ghostly_s 2y ago
It's absolutely ludicrous the US airline industry still has no contingency plan for "a bad software update is pushed by a vendor to our Windows systems."
- SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
  If the computers in a computer reliant massively distributed organization go down, what's the alternative?
  - ThunderSizzle 2y ago
    Computers shouldn't auto update. Updates need to be scheduled and monitored and tested.
    - lazide 2y ago
      Every CTO’s easy answer - cool, we’ll just only do them once every 5 years then. With modern tech stacks, we’re talking hundreds of updates a quarter. If not more.
      - cozzyd 2y ago
        Sounds like they shouldn't be using those tech sticks then.
    - paulmd 2y ago
      That was the defacto state of things up until windows 10 moved to a forced update model. In that world we regularly had massive malware waves and resultant massive botnets constantly disrupting critical infrastructure. We moved away from that for a reason. And the real fix is to make updates not take down the whole system. When was the last time every Linux system in the world was unable to boot all at the same time? Even the crowdstrike issue only took down a very limited subset of installs and the blast radius is far more minimal due to the linux kernel being a lot more sane and cautious.