Delta Air Lines I have hired prominent attorney David Boies to seek damages from Crowd Strike And Microsoft After an outage this month that took down millions of computers, leading to thousands of flights being cancelled.
Shares of CrowdStrike fell about 5% in extended trading Monday after CNBC’s Phil Lebow reported on the appointment of Boies Schiller Flexner, chairman of the board of Boies. Microsoft shares were little changed.
On July 19, a software update from CrowdStrike caused a historic outage of Microsoft systems, bringing many industries to a standstill. Airlines were particularly hard hit, and the Department of Transportation said last week it was investigating Delta, which suffered widespread flight disruptions and service failures.
CrowdStrike lost nearly a quarter of its value in two trading days due to concerns about the company's business in the wake of the incident.
Although no lawsuit has been filed, Delta plans to seek damages from Microsoft and CrowdStrike, Lebois said. Delta did not respond to a request for comment.
The cost of the disruptions to Delta is estimated at $350 million to $500 million. Delta is processing more than 176,000 refund or compensation requests after canceling nearly 7,000 flights.
Boies is best known for representing the U.S. government in its landmark antitrust case against Microsoft, and for helping win a decision that overturned California’s ban on same-sex marriage. He has also worked with Harvey Weinstein, the imprisoned former Hollywood mogul, and Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, who is currently serving a prison sentence for defrauding investors.
Insurance startup Parametrix estimated that the CrowdStrike incident resulted in a total loss of $5.4 billion for Fortune 500 companies, excluding Microsoft.
