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Delta has problems. They were down for like 4-5 days trying to recover, something on the order of 4-5,000 flights cancelled or delayed, and they are being called before various government agencies to explain things. So they're desperate to do the Spiderman finger pointy thing and divert attention. Why not sue people!
Suing CrowdStrike? Well, on the surface that seems reasonable as they were the primary source of the problem.
Suing Microsoft? Hmmm. Just because Delta is using their software, and said software crashed, doesn't really lead a path to recovering damages from them.
There's one really big ginormous fly in the ointment to Delta's LOOK OVER THERE! plan to divert attention and maybe recover money.
Both CrowdStrike AND Microsoft offered to send out technicians to help Delta recover. Repeatedly. CEO to CEO communications. And they were repeatedly rebuffed and ignored. Delta has filed the suits, and MS and CS have responded with demands that ALL internal communications be preserved, meaning that everything Delta said internally, and everything that MS/CS said to Delta, is going to be used to flog Delta mercilessly in court.
MS is also saying that Delta has been very remiss in updating their IT systems, something that slowed down their recovery. Technical debt is a terrible thing, and they may have a very good point there. One commenter on the Ars Technica article says that Delta's scheduling system runs on an IBM 'z' mainframe, and that one of the main problems was that when the Microsoft terminal servers came back up, the mainframe was so flooded with rescheduling requests that it collapsed under load. I'm a little dubious about that, seems to me they should have been able to either throttle the load to a more reasonable level that they could handle, or in many cases, IBM will sell you additional processing capability that's available in your system for an unlock fee, but that may not be true of all systems. I don't know the specifics of Delta's system, whether it was capable of such a thing.
Still, makes me wonder if Delta ever heard of the Streisand Effect...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/08/microsoft-says-deltas-ancient-it-explains-long-outage-after-crowdstrike-snafu/
In other ClownStrike news, in this case quite literal ClownStrike news, someone made a parody web site called Clownstrike.LOL. There's not much to it, some programmer with some time on his hands just wanted to poke some fun at the situation. Very clearly a parody site, as if the .LOL domain name wasn't a solid clue. There's not much content there, that's okay.
The legal boffins at CrowdStrike took umbrage at it and sent a cease & desist to the guy's ISP, Cloudflare. Now, Cloudflare should have taken one look at the C&D, one look at the web site, and replied 'This is clearly protected parody, shove off!'. But they didn't. They told the site owner that he had a bona fide complaint and had to fix his site or it'd be taken down. He replied to their compliance team that it was legally-protected free speech/parody. Never heard boo back from them. Received a second warning. So he moved the web site to a host in Finland.
Ars Technica subsequently contacted both CrowdStrike and Cloudflare, and both acknowledged that it was indeed protected parody and the complaint should never have been sent out or gone down the line.
I expect the site owner will let the domain name and hosting expire after a year and it will vanish into the ether, unless CrowdStrike has another monumental screwup that warrants renewing his site
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/08/parody-site-clownstrike-refused-to-bow-to-crowdstrikes-bogus-dmca-takedown/
Suing CrowdStrike? Well, on the surface that seems reasonable as they were the primary source of the problem.
Suing Microsoft? Hmmm. Just because Delta is using their software, and said software crashed, doesn't really lead a path to recovering damages from them.
There's one really big ginormous fly in the ointment to Delta's LOOK OVER THERE! plan to divert attention and maybe recover money.
Both CrowdStrike AND Microsoft offered to send out technicians to help Delta recover. Repeatedly. CEO to CEO communications. And they were repeatedly rebuffed and ignored. Delta has filed the suits, and MS and CS have responded with demands that ALL internal communications be preserved, meaning that everything Delta said internally, and everything that MS/CS said to Delta, is going to be used to flog Delta mercilessly in court.
MS is also saying that Delta has been very remiss in updating their IT systems, something that slowed down their recovery. Technical debt is a terrible thing, and they may have a very good point there. One commenter on the Ars Technica article says that Delta's scheduling system runs on an IBM 'z' mainframe, and that one of the main problems was that when the Microsoft terminal servers came back up, the mainframe was so flooded with rescheduling requests that it collapsed under load. I'm a little dubious about that, seems to me they should have been able to either throttle the load to a more reasonable level that they could handle, or in many cases, IBM will sell you additional processing capability that's available in your system for an unlock fee, but that may not be true of all systems. I don't know the specifics of Delta's system, whether it was capable of such a thing.
Still, makes me wonder if Delta ever heard of the Streisand Effect...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/08/microsoft-says-deltas-ancient-it-explains-long-outage-after-crowdstrike-snafu/
In other ClownStrike news, in this case quite literal ClownStrike news, someone made a parody web site called Clownstrike.LOL. There's not much to it, some programmer with some time on his hands just wanted to poke some fun at the situation. Very clearly a parody site, as if the .LOL domain name wasn't a solid clue. There's not much content there, that's okay.
The legal boffins at CrowdStrike took umbrage at it and sent a cease & desist to the guy's ISP, Cloudflare. Now, Cloudflare should have taken one look at the C&D, one look at the web site, and replied 'This is clearly protected parody, shove off!'. But they didn't. They told the site owner that he had a bona fide complaint and had to fix his site or it'd be taken down. He replied to their compliance team that it was legally-protected free speech/parody. Never heard boo back from them. Received a second warning. So he moved the web site to a host in Finland.
Ars Technica subsequently contacted both CrowdStrike and Cloudflare, and both acknowledged that it was indeed protected parody and the complaint should never have been sent out or gone down the line.
I expect the site owner will let the domain name and hosting expire after a year and it will vanish into the ether, unless CrowdStrike has another monumental screwup that warrants renewing his site
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/08/parody-site-clownstrike-refused-to-bow-to-crowdstrikes-bogus-dmca-takedown/
