Microsoft Also Claims That Delta Denied Assistance During July Outage

Microsoft attorney Mark Cheffo said on Tuesday that Delta’s public comments are incomplete, false, misleading, and damaging to the tech giant and its reputation in a written response to the airline posted on X by aviation reporter David Slotnick.

This comes a day after CrowdStrike attorney Michael Carlinsky told Delta it was misleading to say CrowdStrike was responsible for the airline’s IT decisions after nationwide outages in mid-July. A letter to Delta by Carlinsky stated CrowdStrike, a global cybersecurity provider, has worked diligently to address the outages, as well as offered onsite assistance to Delta—which Carlinsky says the airline refused.

In Cheffo’s written response to the airline on behalf of Microsoft, Cheffo states that while the tech company’s software had not caused the CrowdStrike incident, the company immediately jumped in and offered to assist Delta at no charge following the July 19 outage.

“Each day that followed from July 19 through July 23, Microsoft employees repeated their offers to help Delta,” Cheffo said in the letter to the airline’s attorney, David Boies. “Each time, Delta turned down Microsoft’s offers to help, even though Microsoft would not have charged Delta for this assistance.”

Additionally, Cheffo states that on the morning of July 22, a Microsoft employee who was aware of Delta’s difficulties recovering from the outage reached out to a Delta employee to offer further assistance.

“The Delta employee replied, saying, ‘All good. Cool will let you know and thank you,’” Cheffo said. “Despite this assessment that things were ‘all good,’ public reports indicate that Delta canceled more than 1,100 flights on July 22 and more than 500 flights on July 23.”

Cheffo said that more senior Microsoft executives also repeatedly reached out to help counterparts at Delta, again with similar results. On July 24, Cheffo said that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella emailed Delta CEO Ed Bastian, who has never replied.

“In fact, it is rapidly becoming apparent that Delta likely refused Microsoft’s help because the IT system it was most having trouble restoring its crew-tracking and scheduling system-was being serviced by other technology providers, such as IBM, because it runs on those providers’ systems, and not Microsoft Windows or Azure,” Cheffo said.

Microsoft’s attorney echoed CrowdStrike’s list of demands to preserve all relevant documents, records, and communications of any kind in the possession of the airline.

“Given Delta’s false and damaging public statements, Microsoft will vigorously defend itself in any litigation if Delta chooses to pursue that path,” Cheffo said.

This article first appeared on AirlineGeeks.com.