Tom Corfman is an attorney and senior consultant at Ragan Consulting Group.
After Delta Airlines’ computer network went down for five days in July, CEO Ed Bastian used a strategy more often associated with the football field than crisis management: The best defense is a good one. that offense.
A flawed update to CrowdStrike’s antivirus software on July 18, 2024, brought down Microsoft Windows networks around the world, affecting every industry, including airlines, which began canceling thousands of flights. But Delta alone launched a PR barrage against the cybersecurity firm, which quickly admitted its responsibility, as well as against Microsoft.
The nation’s second-largest carrier launched its attack by publicly hiring prominent attorney David Boies to sue the two vendors. (Among other cases, Boies is known for representing former Vice President Al Gore in the US Supreme Court case, Bush v Gore, which decided the 2000 presidential election; and for successfully overturning Proposition 8 , California’s ban on same-sex marriage, in 2013.)
Then Delta brought out its big gun, Bastian, who mocked CrowdStrike and Microsoft in an interview with CNBC.
The correct approach is to acknowledge the problem, apologize, fix it and move on. Delta did so and then came out swinging. Maybe because the stakes are too high.
The estimated financial cost of the loss, more than $500 million, could be outweighed by the damage to Delta’s reputation, which has 2023 revenue of $54.7 billion.
Bastian was advised by a communications team that would be the envy of many large corporations. His public relations strategy was probably driven by the fact that Delta took longer to recover from the loss than its competitors.
Corporate communicators will scrutinize Delta’s PR moves, asking questions like: Did the company adequately explain the reason for the long delay? Was it done in a timely manner? Has the company diverted media attention from Delta and back to CrowdStrike and Microsoft? Or did Delta simply extend the coverage of an embarrassing and costly chapter?
We don’t know enough to answer these questions yet, but analyzing the events can help us start thinking about them.
The outage
Computers began crashing on the night of Thursday, July 18, when Microsoft reported that its networks crashed, according to CNN. At 3:54 am the next morning, Delta said it had grounded all of its flights. About an hour later, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz posted a message on social media saying the company’s software update caused the networks to crash.
During the busiest travel weekend of the summer, air travel came to a standstill.
As of Monday, July 22, most carriers had recovered except for Delta, the Associated Press reported. The company did not resume normal operations until the morning of July 25, after canceling more than 7,000 flights.
Delta’s initial response
The company posted 13 updates on its news site from July 19 to July 25. In statements, Bastian apologized on July 21 and 24.
As part of his initial apology, Bastian explained that the company’s Windows-based crew-tracking software, which schedules flight teams with available planes, “did not effectively process the unprecedented number of of changes triggered by system shutdown.”
The company immediately offered their customers refunds, reimbursement for out-of-pocket expenses and credits for their loyalty program.
Carrying Boies
Delta fired its first shot on July 29, when CNBC reported that night that the company had hired Boies, 83. The next day, the media began reporting news of Boies’ hiring and letters from him to CrowdStrike and Microsoft wrote the previous day.
The interview
Two days later, Bastian revised the attack in a friendly interview on “Squawk Box,” on CNBC.
Cohost Andrew Ross Sorkin, also a New York Times financial columnist, began by praising Delta’s “fantastic” passenger lounge at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.
In the July 31 interview, Sorkin did not press Bastian as he made his case:
- “The issue is exactly … with Microsoft and CrowdStrike and we’re heavy on both. We’re the heaviest in the industry on both. And so, we’ve been hit hard in terms of recovery capability.
- “Microsoft and CrowdStrike are the top two competitors around cyber to each other. So, they don’t necessarily partner at the same level that we need them to.”
- “We have no choice” but to sue.
- “If you’re going to have access, priority access to the Delta ecosystem in terms of technology, you have to test this thing… You can’t come into a mission critical 24/7 operation and tell us we have a bug. ”
- “They are not offering anything. Free consulting advice to help us. That’s right. That’s really it. But that’s the extent of it.”
- “I feel like they are [Microsoft] perhaps the most fragile platform within that space. When was the last time you heard about a big loss at Apple?”
Sorkin returned to the Delta lounge in the last minute of the 6:34 interview, which was widely covered.
Unintended consequences?
The story began to fall silent until reporters obtained CrowdStrike’s attorney’s response to Boies’ July 29 letter.
Delta needs to explain why its “competitors, facing similar challenges, have all been able to restore operations more quickly,” wrote Michael Carlinsky, a partner at the law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, one of the 20 largest law firms in the US
CrowdStrike’s CEO personally offered Bastian help, but the Delta CEO did not respond, Carlinsky wrote in an Aug. 4 letter. Delta’s IT team declined help from CrowdStrike that other airlines accepted, he added.
Carlinsky denied that CrowdStrike was grossly negligent, the standard for legal liability in such cases.
Not to be outdone, Microsoft’s attorney sent a strong response to Boies’ letter on August 6.
“Our preliminary analysis suggests that Delta, unlike its competitors, does not seem to have modernized its IT infrastructure, either for the benefit of its customers or for its pilots and flight attendants,” wrote Mark Cheffo, a partner at Dechert, another large law firm.
Bastian did not respond to an email from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella offering the company help, Cheffo added. Delta’s IT team also rejected other offers from Microsoft.
Not content to leave it at that, Boies responded with another letter, accusing CrowdStrike of a “blame the victim” defense. And Bastian told the Wall Street Journal that the offers of help came after Delta solved the problem on its own.
The General
In its initial response, Delta acknowledged that its recovery from the outage was slow, but it didn’t admit what everyone already knew: Its response was slower than its competitors. Such an admission could increase the credibility of Bastian’s apology.
Its attack on CrowdStrike drove home what that company had already admitted. Even if Bastian successfully changed the public’s perception of blame, the charges could raise other questions in the future. Who took them? And who is in charge of them?
Customers, employees, and shareholders will be accountable to the CEO.
“It was a wakeup call for me,” Bastian said in the CNBC interview. Maybe he should have asked the front desk for an earlier call.
Although he successfully changed public perception, it came at the cost of widening the scope of the debacle for 12 days. Lawsuits will spark more coverage.
Although Delta’s apparent approach, “The best defense is a good offense,” is often associated with football coaches, it was popularized by boxer Jack Dempsey, the world heavyweight champion from 1919 to 1926.
The concept began in a letter George Washington wrote in 1799 to John Trumbull, an artist and his former aide-de-camp during the Revolutionary War.
After he left office, Washington wrote, “Offensive operations, usually, are the sure, if not the only (in some cases) means of defense.”
Perhaps Bastian’s strategy was his only form of defense.
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