Microsoft has responded to Delta Air Lines\u2019 criticism of Windows and CrowdStrike after the giant IT outage last month. Delta CEO Ed Bastian wants compensation<\/a> from both CrowdStrike and Microsoft for the estimated $500 million Delta lost due to the outage. Now, Microsoft says Delta refused its free help on multiple occasions and even ignored an email from CEO Satya Nadella to Bastian.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cMicrosoft empathizes with Delta and its customers regarding the impact of the CrowdStrike incident. But your letter and Delta\u2019s public comments are incomplete, false, misleading, and damaging to Microsoft and its reputation,\u201d says Mark Cheffo, co-chair of Dechert\u2019s global litigation practice, in a letter on behalf of Microsoft to Delta\u2019s lawyers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The letter, embedded below, aims to paint a very different picture of the incident following Bastian\u2019s comments in an interview with CNBC<\/a> <\/em>last week. Bastian called Microsoft fragile and asked, \u201cWhen was the last time you heard of a big outage at Apple?\u201d He also revealed that more than 40,000 of the company\u2019s servers had been hit by CrowdStrike\u2019s faulty update. Microsoft\u2019s letter suggests that Delta\u2019s problems might run a lot deeper than its Windows server outage, though.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cEven though Microsoft\u2019s software had not caused the CrowdStrike incident, Microsoft immediately jumped in and offered to assist Delta at no charge following the July 19th outage,\u201d says the letter from Cheffo. \u201cEach day that followed from July 19th through July 23rd, Microsoft employees repeated their offers to help Delta. Each time, Delta turned down Microsoft\u2019s offers to help, even though Microsoft would not have charged Delta for this assistance.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Microsoft also claims that an employee contacted Delta on July 22nd to offer any help the airline needed, but a Delta employee replied that things were \u201call good\u201d on the same day Delta canceled more than 1,100 flights, followed by 500 more cancellations the day after.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cMore senior Microsoft executives also repeatedly reached out to help their counterparts at Delta, again with similar results,\u201d writes Cheffo. \u201cAmong others, on Wednesday, July 24th, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella emailed Delta CEO Ed Bastian, who has never replied.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Bastian may well have missed that email from Nadella because he was busy flying to the Olympic Games in Paris, as Delta is the official airline for Team USA. Among all the flight cancellations after the CrowdStrike outage, Delta had to scramble<\/a> to fulfill its Team USA obligations to get athletes to Paris on time.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Microsoft thinks Delta refused its free help because it was actually struggling to restore non-Windows systems instead. \u201cIt is rapidly becoming apparent that Delta likely refused Microsoft\u2019s help because the IT system it was most having trouble restoring \u2014 its crew-tracking and scheduling system \u2014 was being serviced by other technology providers, such as IBM, because it runs on those providers\u2019 systems, and not Microsoft Windows or Azure,\u201d says Microsoft\u2019s letter.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That suggests that Delta was hit by the CrowdStrike outage on its Windows systems and that those failures then impacted its IT infrastructure that was serviced by IBM and others. Microsoft says Delta \u201capparently has not modernized its IT infrastructure,\u201d so it was more impacted by the CrowdStrike outage than rivals like American Airlines or United Airlines.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Sign up for Notepad<\/span> by Tom Warren, a weekly newsletter uncovering the secrets and strategy behind Microsoft\u2019s era-defining bets on AI, gaming, and computing. Subscribe to get the latest straight to your inbox.<\/p>\n