Delta is bracing for a $500 million financial hit from its historic meltdown, CEO Ed Bastian said on Wednesday. But even after canceling more than 5,000 flights long after other carriers resumed flying smoothly, Bastian continued to pin the blame squarely on the global CrowdStrike outage earlier this month.
“This cost us a half a billion dollars,” Bastian said in a CNBC interview Wednesday, explaining that figure encompasses lost bookings, refunds, and reimbursements for passengers. “It was terrible. Apologies again to our customers, our people … It was just a really, really tough situation.”
Those are Bastian's first public remarks since the start of Delta's worst operational collapse in recent memory. The interview was filmed in Paris, where Bastian flew to attend the Summer Olympics last Tuesday – a day when Delta canceled more than 500 flights.
By the time Delta stabilized last week, the Atlanta-based airline had canceled more than 5,500 flights over a five-day span – more than its cancellations in all of 2018 and 2019, according to federal data. While American Airlines and United were also affected by CrowdStrike's outage, Delta canceled more than twice as many flights as those two carriers combined last week.
Read more: What Really Caused Delta's Meltdown & How the Airline Bungled its Response
Yet Delta is making a full-court press to lay the blame solely at CrowdStrike's feet. That's not the full story.
While it started with a brief outage Friday that affected many major airlines and other industries, it snowballed into a Delta problem – and a Delta problem alone.
In internal videos shared with Delta employees, executives acknowledged that one of its critical crew scheduling platforms – one the airline uses to track down its pilots and flight attendants and assign them to flights – broke down. While other airlines were back to normal by last Monday, Delta still canceled more than 1,000 flights for a fourth day in a row because that antiquated system was still not functioning.
“That's been the system that we've tried to pump more horsepower into,” Chief Information Officer Rahul Samant told employees, according to a transcript of the exchange provided to Thrifty Traveler. But every time Delta tried to restart that system it would falter, triggering more cancellations that would, in turn, make matters worse.
Bastian mentioned none of that in Wednesday's interview.
“It's Microsoft and CrowdStrike, and we are heavy with both. We are by far the heaviest in the industry with both and so we got hit the hardest in terms of the recovery capability,” Bastian said.
The goal is clear: Delta wants CrowdStrike to foot that $500 million bill. Bastian confirmed that Delta is preparing to sue the cybersecurity provider.
“We have no choice,” he said. “We have to protect our shareholders, we have to protect our customers, our employees for the damage – not just for the costs, but the brand, the reputational damage.”