Delta Air Lines has lost a battle to have a consumer lawsuit brought by disgruntled passengers impacted by the Crowdstike IT meltdown in July 2024 thrown out of federal court.
A group of passengers who missed cruises and other important events after Delta canceled flights sued the airline in the wake of the operational meltdown for breach of contract and a slew of other claims.
One of the claimants is John Brennan, who had hoped to travel with his wife from their home in Florida to Seattle for a cruise vacation. John’s flight was booked a couple of days after the initial Crowdstrike outage when other airlines had already recovered their operations.
It was, however, a very different scenario at Delta, where the airline had lost track of thousands of pilots and flight attendants because its crew scheduling software had gone into meltdown as a result of the short outage.
Delta managed to rebook the Brennan’s on a connecting flight through its Atlanta hub, but once there, John and his wife found out their onward flight to Seattle had been scrapped.
After lining up for hours in a desperate attempt to get rebooked on an alternative flight, the Brennans discovered that all of Delta’s customer service agents had abandoned the airport for the night.
The couple eventually admitted defeat, accepting that they wouldn’t make it to Seattle in time to join the $10,000 cruise. With flight schedules still a mess, the Brennans then had to travel back to Florida by Greyhound bus.
Delta had promised the Brennans reimbursement for travel costs but only ended up offering them a $100 future travel voucher and $219 reimbursement for their bus tickets. The reimbursement required the Brennans to waive their right to file a legal claim against Delta.
Following months of legal tussling, Delta filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that the Aviation Deregulation Act preempted the claim and that claimants like the Brennans had failed to properly state a claim.
Last week, a federal judge concluded in a lengthy ruling that Delta’s motion to dismiss should be dismissed, although the airline succeeded in having several other claims made under local state laws and European denied boarding regulations thrown out of court.
The initial outage occurred on July 19, 2024, when a bug-ridden update to security software created by Crowdstrike was automatically pushed to tens of thousands of Microsoft-powered computers around the world.
The update took critical IT systems offline for businesses using Crowdstrike software, including banks, supermarkets, and many international airlines.
Crowdstrike was able to roll back the update within hours, and most businesses affected by the short outage had fully recovered their operations within a matter of a few days.
The developing situation at Delta couldn’t, however, have been much different. Cancellations and delays racked up for days after the outage, and a blame game quickly ensued between the airline and Crowdstrike.
It transpired that Delta’s inability to recover its operation was due to an issue with its crew scheduling and tracking software, which was an old legacy system created by IBM that didn’t even run Crowdstike.
Delta accused Crowdstrike and Microsoft of failing to help fix the mess, but they claimed it was, in fact, Delta that refused help because it knew that the cause of the meltdown was an antiquated IT system.
The remaining plaintiffs in the consumer lawsuit against Delta can now proceed with their claims, with further hearings expected to take place in the coming weeks.
