Delta Airlines last week witnessed a disruption never seen before: all this because of a software update from CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company, which sent the airline’s systems into wide-scale failure. More than 2,500 flights were scrubbed over days amid an investigation by the U.S. Department of Transportation.
As the probe got under way, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg called for fair treatment of airline passengers. Delta reacted with a statement, saying it would fully cooperate with the investigation and apologize to affected customers for the inconvenience the vendor technology outage had caused.
The vulnerability of Delta to such a disruption shocked industry analysts. According to Henry Harteveldt of Atmosphere Research Group, “While the worst seems to be behind them, many travelers are still leery of flying Delta.”.
Experts described the CrowdStrike outage as having been particularly pervasive because of how deeply the application had been integrated with the internal operating systems at Delta. David Bader, a New Jersey Institute of Technology professor on cybersecurity, highlighted how the bug knocked out critical services used to do everything from scheduling to customer service at the airline.
According to Mark Lanterman, CTO at Computer Forensic Services, this flawed software update caused Windows systems to crash and stopped vital services across the network of Delta. The company said something about half its worldwide IT systems using Windows, providing an idea of the scale of the issue.
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This long recovery time was attributed to the fact that fixes on individual computer systems had to be made manually. Since Delta’s digital infrastructure is very expansive, each of these IT-related measures had to be taken separately at every affected terminal, which took a long time.
Delta acknowledged the challenges of the manual nature of repair, which explained that each system had to be rebooted and resynchronized after fixing. Such methodical efforts at resolving the issue added to the duration of the disruption the airline and its passengers were facing.
While the Delta works to get back into its normal operations and rebuild customer trust, the incident has become a launching pad for debates on how even the biggest of companies can be crippled due to IT failures and the propensity of the aviation sector to be dovetailed into more stringent contingency plans.