Delta Air Lines dials up Microsoft's legal nemesis over CrowdStrike losses

Delta Air Lines lost hundreds of millions of dollars due to the CrowdStrike outage earlier this month – and it has hired a high-powered law firm to claw some of those lost funds back, potentially from the Falcon maker and Microsoft itself. CNBC broke the news yesterday that Delta had hired famed lawyer David Boies to look into …

[Anonymous Coward]

"CrowdStrike's Ts&Cs limit its liability only to refunding customer money paid for services rendered, and excludes any obligation to refund customers for losses due to interrupted service or other problems."

So Delta is probably not hiring the law firm to go after CrowdStrike, instead they're working to incorporate similar Ts&Cs into Delta's customer agreements regarding cancelled flights.

[DS999]

They can't, the government regulates some things about flying, including requirements for refunds when the flight is canceled.

[UnknownUnknown]

More Government Agency overreach !!

… post Chevron fuck-up by SCOTUS

[UnknownUnknown]

Just because it says that in the T&C’s does not stop some whacked out judge - say in East Texas - finding against them for something.

I’m sure after all Terms and Conditions are not mentioned in the US Constitution as written by the founding fathers… so are invalid legally anyway.

Delta will win any cocks on the table contest.

[Roger Kynaston]

Missing elephants

Another of Boies Schiller's clients was one Darl MacBride, one time CEO of SCO. He also represented Victoria Giuffre agains the Prince once known as Andrew if I remember correclty.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Missing elephants

ITYM the Andrew once known as Prince.

[Roger Kynaston]

Re: Missing elephants

Quite right. Too much rapid typing going on.

[Allen Smith]

Re: Missing elephants

ITYM the Andrew *formerly* known as Prince.

[Doctor Syntax]

Are the T&Cs sufficient to defeat gross negligence? Do they cover pushed updates? Alternatively how would a defence that they disclaim the product's being of any use whatsoever help subsequent sales?

[Sparkus]

SolarWinds seems to be dodging responsibility / accountability for their failings......

[ZaphodHarkonnen]

For B2B contracts it's generally a lot harder to get such clauses ruled as not applicable. The idea being that businesses have the capability to examine contracts throughly. And Delta is not some small four person business who could argue they didn't have a reasonable ability to understand.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's certainly the case in the UK, where (to greatly/over simplify it) the consumer is presumed to be an idiot and needs to be protected from harm; there are a few explicit exceptions, usually where the contract is overseen by a presumed competent person (such as a solicitor when buying a house). Businesses are presumed competent and should know exactly what they're signing up to (caveat emptor).

IANAL but I used to assess students taking law modules on management qualifications and a common way to lose marks was to refer to consumer law when considering B2B contracts.

[Sparkus]

The CS event was....

.....enabled by a combination of bad build and testing on the part of CS **and** (don't forget) deliberate design decision by msft to hide a set of API calls that set their own internal AV solution (Defender) at a significant performance advantage compared to third-party tools.

When msft was caught with their design pants down, the decision was made to open those APIs up to everyone and anyone when the rational/good design decision should have been to kill off the calls.

And that's how we got here.

The court case that needs to be settled is if msft and their managers/executives are liable for global user damages caused by poor design and implementation of their products.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: The CS event was....

I wish you luck - they've been dodging that responsibility for what? 4 decades or so?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: The CS event was....

It looks like CS didn't read the T&C applicable when writing "drivers" for MS systems, so...

[RErnes]

Good luck to CS!

I'll get the popcorn while delta tries to recoup the loss for their negligence at accepting a single point of failure.

All endpoint security products are a single point of failure and it's part of the balance between security, relability and convenience. Working at a bank, we had a few issues with Netscaler, in which internet connectivity would be lost due to their MITM proxies suddently blocking some IPs. CS will have a day explaining how other companies were able to recover quickly and expose the incompetence of Delta IT systems. From this article, what Delta says is that a backlog in one system created a cascade effect on other of their systems because it was never considered a scenario.

Microsoft will also shrug this off and I wouldn't be suprised if the next time Delta needs to renew a contract with MS the cost will be materially higher.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Good luck to CS!

What if CS or a similar solution was requested by Delta's insurers?

Knowing that ALL such systems are liable to the same kind of failure? (because testing is bad, time consuming, and costs too much)