Delta Air Lines is in more hot water with customers, after a group of them filed a class action lawsuit this week.
The suit was filed this week on behalf of customers of the major airline who had their flights canceled because of the tech outage that happened across the globe. These customers say Delta refused to give them refunds, even though their flights were canceled.
That outage was caused when a computer program update from CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company, crashed computers that were running the Windows software across the world.
While many companies across all different industries were affected by the outage, Delta was hit particularly hard. Its CEO Ed Bastian even said that for some reason, his company was hit much harder than other airlines, suffering losses of about $500 million due to the cancellations and delays that happened to its flights.
Still, the class action lawsuit claims that Delta “refused or ignored” requests from customers to receive a refund because of their canceled or delayed flights. The suit also claims that the company didn’t provide its customers who were impacted with vouchers that they could use for lodging, transportation or even food.
As the complaint states:
“These unfair, unlawful and unconscionable practices resulted in Delta unjustly enriching itself at the expense of its customers.
“Accordingly, Plaintiffs bring this action in order to secure refunds for each and every similarly situated consumer Delta has wronged by refusing to issue full refunds for flights canceled or significantly affected as a direct and proximate result of the CrowdStrike outage.”
In recent comments, Bastian said the company could file its own lawsuit against CrowdStrike, though the cybersecurity firm has pushed back on how Delta has characterized the outage.
One of CrowdStrike’s lawyers, Michael Carlinsky, said this week that they were “highly disappointed” over Delta’s actions accusing them of doing anything inappropriate. He pointed to the fact that CrowdStrike apologized after the incident occurred.
In addition, Carlinsky publicly questioned why many other major airlines recovered from that outage quickly, while Delta struggled. He wrote that in a recent letter he sent to David Boies, a lawyer for Delta.
Mark Cheffo, a lawyer for Microsoft, also sent a letter to Boies, questioning why “other airlines were able to fully restore business operations so much faster than Delta.” He wrote that the key IT system that Delta uses is serviced by companies other than Microsoft, as The Associated Press reported recently.
As Cheffo wrote:
“Your letter and Delta’s public comments are incomplete, false, misleading and damaging to Microsoft and its reputation.”
Microsoft and CrowdStrike both said that Delta turned down an offer they made to help them recover from that outage. While the outage was ongoing, Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, reached out to Bastian via email, but he never replied apparently.
Delta is also facing an investigation by the Department of Transportation, which is looking into the details of all the mass delays and cancellations of its flights.
