- Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said the massive IT outage earlier this month that stranded thousands of customers will cost it $500 million.
- The airline canceled more than 4,000 flights in the wake of the outage, which was caused by a botched CrowdStrike software update and took thousands of Microsoft systems around the world offline.
- Bastian, speaking from Paris, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Wednesday that the carrier would seek damages from the disruptions, adding, “We have no choice.”
6 points
Please go read up on how this error happened.
This is not a backwards compatibility thing, or on Microsoft at all, despite the flaws you accurately point out. For that matter the entire architecture of modern PCs is a weird hodgepodge of new systems tacked onto older ones.
- Crowdstrike’s signed driver was set to load at boot, edit: by Crowdstrike.
- Crowdstrike’s signed driver was running unsigned code at the kernel level and it crashed. It crashed because the code was trying to read a pointer from the corrupt file data, and it had no protection at all against a bad file.
Just to reiterate: It loaded up a file and read from it at the kernel level without any checks that the file was valid.
- As it should, windows treats any crash at the kernel level as a critical issue. and bluescreens the system to protect it.
The entire fix is to boot into safe mode and delete the corrupt update file crowdstrike sent.
