- Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said the massive IT outage earlier this month that stranded thousands of customers will cost it $500 million.
- The airline canceled more than 4,000 flights in the wake of the outage, which was caused by a botched CrowdStrike software update and took thousands of Microsoft systems around the world offline.
- Bastian, speaking from Paris, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Wednesday that the carrier would seek damages from the disruptions, adding, “We have no choice.”
Sure, but they did send a $10 Uber Eats gift card, so you gotta take that into account.
499,999,990. Could be worse.
Edit: oh I see someone else beat me to it
Make it per affected device and then we can talk.
499.999.990
Remember that you got your $10 gift card for Uber eats.
No, only the partners did
Which didn’t work.
It worked but there was a $10 convenience fee.
Technically, it was a $10 gift card for each IT technician, so that could have been a whole $100!
Not so bad after all
Pretty sure their software’s legal agreement, and the corresponding enterprise legal agreement, already cover this.
The update was the first domino, but the real issue was the disarray of Delta’s IT Operations and their inability to adequately recover in a timely fashion. Sounds like a customer skimping on their lifecycle and capacity planning so that Ed can get just a bit bigger bonus for meeting his budget numbers.
Couldn’t agree more.
And now that this occurred, and cost $500m, perhaps finally some enterprise companies may actually resource IT departments better and allow them to do their work. But who am I kidding, that’s never going to happen if it hits bonuses and dividends :(
According to The headhunters are constantly trying to recruit me for inappropriate jobs it is starting to get traction with companies and they are starting to actually hire fully skilled it departments. Opposed to the ones merely willing to work for near minimum wage which is what they had before.
In some ways it won’t really make a difference because fully staffed up I.T departments also needs to be listened to by management, and that doesn’t happen often in corporate environments, but still they’ll pay the big bucks so that’s good enough for me.
Fucking lol.
We just lost 500 million - we can’t afford that right now! /s
I wasn’t affected by this at all and only followed it on the news and through memes, but I thought this was something that needed hands-on-keyboard to fix, which I could see not being the fault of IT because they stopped planning for issues that couldn’t be handled remotely.
Was there some kind of automated way to fix all the machines remotely? Is there a way Delta could have gotten things working faster? I’m genuinely curious because this is one of those Windows things that I’m too Macintosh to understand.
There was no easy automated way if the systems were encrypted, which any sane organization mandates. So yes, did require hands-on-keyboard. But all the other airlines were up and running much faster, and they all had to perform the same fix.
Basically, in macOS terms, the OS fails to boot, so every system just goes to recovery only, and you need to manually enter the recovery lock and encryption password on every system to delete a file out of /System (which isn’t allowed in macOS because it’s read only but just go with it) before it will boot back into macOS. Hope you had those recorded/managed/backed up somewhere otherwise it’s a complete system reinstall…
So yeah, not fun for anyone involved.
All the servers and infrastructure should have “lights out management”. I can turn on a server, reconfigure the bios and install windows from scratch on the other side of the world.
Potentially all the workstations / end point devices would need to be repaired though.
The initial day or two I’ll happily blame on crowdstrike. After that, it’s on their IT department for not having good DR plans.
Hell I just did that with what’s effectively a black box this morning - if it’s critical, it gets done the right way or it don’t bother doing it at all.
Negligence can make contracts a little less permanent.
Delta was the only airline to suffer a long outage. That’s why I say Crowdstrike is the kickoff, but the poor, drawn-out response and time to resolve it is totally on Delta.
Idk, crowdstike had a few screwups in their pocket before this one. They might be on the hook for costs associated with an outage caused by negligence. I’m not a lawyer, but I do stand next to one in the elevator.
Maybe not.
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Bastian said the figure includes not just lost revenue but “the tens of millions of dollars per day in compensation and hotels” over a period of five days. The amount is roughly in line with analysts’ estimates. Delta didn’t disclose how many customers were affected or how many canceled their flights.
It’s important to note that the DOT recently clarified a rule that reinforced that if an airline cancels a flight, they have to compensate the customer. So that’s the real reason why Delta had to spend so much, they couldn’t ignore their customers and had to pay out for their inconvenience.
So think about how much worse it might have been for fliers if a more industry-friendly Transportation Secretary were in charge. The airlines might not have had to pay out nearly as much to stranded customers, and we’d be hearing about how stranded fliers got nothing at all.
Now do Canada.
Our best airline just got bought by pretty much a broadcom, mechs are striking because, well, Canada isn’t an at-will state near Jersey, everyone’s looking to bail because now they have to be the dicks to customers they didn’t like being at the other (national) airline. The whole enshittification enchilada.
Late flights? Check. Missed connections? Check. Luggage? Laughable. And extra. Compensation? “No hablo canadiensis”.
We need that hard rule where they fuck up and they gotta make it rain too.
Like, is it so hard to keep a working but dark airplane in a parking spot for when that flight’s delayed because the lav check valve is jammed? This seems to be basic capacity planning and business continuity. They need to get a clue under their skin or else they get the hose again.
They need to get a clue under their skin or else they get the hose again.
Is that why they call you hosers?
Yeah… Maybe don’t put all your IT eggs in one basket next time.
Delta is the one that chose to use Crowdstrike on so many critical systems therefore the fault still lies with Delta.
Every big company thinks that when they outsource a solution or buy software they’re getting out of some responsibility. They’re not. When that 3rd party causes a critical failure the proverbial finger still points at the company that chose to use the 3rd party.
The shareholders of Delta should hold this guy responsible for this failure. They shouldn’t let him get away with blaming Crowdstrike.
So you think Delta should’ve had a different antivirus/EDR running on every computer?
If I were in charge I wouldn’t put anything critical on Windows. Not only because it’s total garbage from a security standpoint but it’s also garbage from a stability standpoint. It’s always had these sorts of problems and it always will because Microsoft absolutely refuses to break backwards compatibility and that’s precisely what they’d have to do in order to move forward into the realm of, “modern OS”. Things like NTFS and the way file locking works would need to go. Everything being executable by default would need to end and so, so much more low-level stuff that would break like everything.
Aside about stability: You just cannot keep Windows up and running for long before you have to reboot due to the way file locking works (nearly all updates can’t apply until the process owning them “lets go”, as it were and that process usually involves kernel stuff… due to security hacks they’ve added on since WinNT 3.5 LOL). You can’t make it immutable. You can’t lock it down in any effective way without disabling your ability to monitor it properly (e.g. with EDR tools). It just wasn’t made for that… It’s a desktop operating system. Meant for ONE user using it at a time (and one main application/service, really). Trying to turn it into a server that runs many processes simultaneously under different security contexts is just not what it was meant to do. The only reason why that kinda sort of works is because of hacks upon hacks upon hacks and very careful engineering around a seemingly endless array of stupid limitations that are a core part of the OS.
Please go read up on how this error happened.
This is not a backwards compatibility thing, or on Microsoft at all, despite the flaws you accurately point out. For that matter the entire architecture of modern PCs is a weird hodgepodge of new systems tacked onto older ones.
- Crowdstrike’s signed driver was set to load at boot.
- Crowdstrike’s signed driver was running unsigned code at the kernel level and it crashed. It crashed because the code was trying to read a pointer from the corrupt file data, and it had no protection at all against a bad file.
Just to reiterate: It loaded up a file and read from it at the kernel level without any checks that the file was valid.
- As it should, windows treats any crash at the kernel level as a critical issue. and bluescreens the system to protect it.
The entire fix is to boot into safe mode and delete the corrupt update file crowdstrike sent.
I think what @riskable@programming.dev was saying is you shouldn’t have multiple mission critical systems all using the same 3rd party services. Have a mix of at least two, so if one 3rd party service goes down not everything goes down with it
In this case, it’s a local third party tool and they thought they could control to cadence of updates. There was no reason to think there was anything particularly unstable about the situation.
This is closer to saying that half of your servers should be Linux and half should be windows in case one has a bug.
Crowdstrike bypassed user controls on updates.
The normal responsible course of action is to deploy an update to a small test environment, test to make sure it doesn’t break anything, and then slowly deploy it to more places while watching for unexpected errors.
Crowdstrike shotgunned it to every system at once without monitoring, with grossly inadequate testing, and entirely bypassed any user configurable setting to avoid or opt out of the update.I was much more willing to put the blame on the organizers that had the outages for failing to follow best practices before I learned that they way the update was pushed would have entirely bypassed any of those safeguards.
It’s unreasonable to say that an organization needs to run multiple copies of every service with different fundamental infrastructure choices for each in case one magics itself broken.
Crowdstrike also bypassed Microsoft’s driver signing as part of their update process, just to make the updates release faster.
That MS is getting any flak for this is just shit journalism.
That sounds easy to say, but in execution it would be massively complicated. Modern enterprises are littered with 3rd party services all over the place. The alternative is writing and maintaining your own solution in house, which is an incredibly heavy lift to cover the entirety of all services needed in the enterprise. Most large enterprises are resources starved as is, and this suggestion of having redundancy for any 3rd party service that touches mission critical workloads would probably increase burden and costs by at least 50%. I don’t see that happening in commercial companies.
As far as the companies go, their lack of resources is an entirely self-inflicted problem, because they’re won’t invest in increasing those resources, like more IT infrastructure and staff. It’s the same as many companies that keep terrible backups of their data (if any) when they’re not bound to by the law, because they simply don’t want to pay for it, even though it could very well save them from ruin.
The crowdstrike incident was as bad as it was exactly because loads of companies had their eggs in one basket. Those that didn’t recovered much quicker. Redundancy is the lesson to take from this that none of them will learn.
As far as the companies go, their lack of resources is an entirely self-inflicted problem, because they’re won’t invest in increasing those resources, like more IT infrastructure and staff.
Play that out to its logical conclusion.
- Our example airline suddenly doubles or triples its IT budget.
- The increased costs don’t actually increase profit it merely increases resiliency
- Other airlines don’t do this.
- Our example airline has to increase ticket prices or fees to cover the increased IT spending.
- Other airlines don’t do this.
- Customers start predominantly flying the other airlines with their cheaper fares.
- Our example airline goes out of business, or gets acquired by one of the other airlines
The end result is all operating airlines are back to the prior stance.
customers start predominantly flying the other airlines with cheaper fares
I was with you till this part, except with the way flying is set up in this country, there’s very little competition between airlines. They’ve essentially set themselves up with airports/hubs so if an airline is down for a day, that’s kinda it unless you want to switch to a different airport.
Our example airline has to increase ticket prices or fees to cover the increased IT spending.
Or they could just cut already excessive executive bonuses…
You know they’re not going to do that, so how useful is it to suggest that? If we just want to talk about pie-in-the-sky fixes then sure, but at the end of that we’ll likely have nationalized airlines, which that isn’t happening either.
So are we talking about fantasy or things that can actually happen?
Two big assumptions here.
First, multiple business systems are already being supported, and the OS only incidentally. Assuming double or triple IT costs is very unlikely, but feel free to post evidence to the contrary.
Second, a tight coupling between costs and prices. Anyone that’s been paying attention to gouging and shrinkflation of the past few years of record profits, or the doomsaying virtually anywhere the minimum wage has increased and businesses haven’t been annihilated, would know this is nonsense.
First, multiple business systems are already being supported, and the OS only incidentally. Assuming double or triple IT costs is very unlikely, but feel free to post evidence to the contrary.
The suggestion the poster made was that ALL 3rd party services need to have an additional counterpart for redundancy. So we’re not just talking about a second AV vendor. We have to duplicate ALL 3rd party services running on or supporting critical workloads to meet what that poster is suggesting.
- inventory agents
- OS patching
- security vulnerability scanning
- file and DB level backup
- monitoring and alerting
- remote access management
- PAM management
- secrets management
- config managment
…the list goes on.
Anyone that’s been paying attention to gouging and shrinkflation of the past few years of record profits, or the doomsaying virtually anywhere the minimum wage has increased and businesses haven’t been annihilated, would know this is nonsense.
You’re suggesting the companies simply take less profits? Those company’s board of directors will get annihilated by shareholders. The board would be voted out with their IT improvement plans, and replace with those that would return to profitability.
Adding another reply since I went on a bit of a rant in my other one… You’re actually missing the point I was trying to make: No matter what solution you choose it’s still your fault for choosing it. There are a zillion mitigations and “back up plans” that can be used when you feel like you have no choice but to use a dangerous 3rd party tool (e.g. one that installs kernel modules). Delta obviously didn’t do any of that due diligence.
Sounds like they executed their plans just fine.
And due diligence is “the investigation or exercise of care that a reasonable business or person is normally expected to take before entering into an agreement or contract with another party or an act with a certain standard of care”. Having BC/DR plans isn’t part of due diligence.
Kernel module is basically the only way to implement this type of security software. That’s the only thing that has system wide access to realtime filesystem and network events.
Yes, they’re ultimately liable to their customers because that’s how liability works, but it’s really hard to argue that they’re at fault for picking a standard piece of software from a leading vendor that functions roughly the same as every piece of software in this space for every platform functions, which then bypassed all configurations they could make to control updates, grabbed a corrupted update and crashed the computer.
It’s like saying it’s the drivers fault the brakes on their Toyota failed and they crashed into someone. Yes, they crashed and so their insurance is going to have to cover it, but you don’t get angry at the driver for purchasing a common car in good condition and having it break in a way they can’t control.What mitigations should they have had? All computer systems are mostly third party tools. Your OS is a third party tool. Your programming language is a third party tool. Webserver, database, loadbalancer, caching server: all third party tools. Hardware drivers? Usually third party, but USB has made a lot of things more generic.
If your package manager decides to ignore your configuration and update your kernel to something mangled and reboot, your computer is going to crash and it’ll stay down until you can get in there to tell it to stop booting the mangled kernel.
It is absolutely not the only way to implement EDR. Linux has eBPF which is what Crowdstrike and other tools use on Linux instead of a kernel module. A kernel module is only necessary on Windows because Windows doesn’t provide the necessary functionality.
Mitigating factors: Use (and take) regular snapshots and test them. My company had all our virtual desktops restored within half an hour on that day. If you don’t think Windows Volume Shadow Copy is capable or actually useful for that in the real world then you’re making my argument for me! LOL
Another option is to use systems (like Linux) that let you monitor these sorts of EDR things while remaining super locked down. You can run EDR tools on immutable Linux systems! You can’t do that on Windows because (of backwards compatibility!) that OS can’t run properly in an immutable share.
Windows was not made to be secure like that. It’s security contexts are just hacks upon hacks. Far too many things need admin rights (or more privileges!) just to function on a basic level.
OSes like Linux were built to deal with these sorts of things. Linux, specifically, has gone though so many stages of evolution it makes Windows look like a dinosaur that barely survived the asteroid impact somehow.
eBPF, the kernel level tool? Because you need to be in the kernel to have that level of access, which is what I was saying? The one with a bug that crowd strike hit that caused Linux servers to KP?
Yes, I said “kernel module” when I should have said “software executing in a kernel context”. That’s on me.By the way, eBPF? Third party software by most metrics. Developed and maintained by Facebook, Cisco, Microsoft, Google and friends. Also available on windows, albeit not as deeply integrated due to the layers of cruft you mention.
I’m glad you were able to recover your VMs quickly. How quickly were you able to recover your non-virtualized devices, like laptops, desktops or that poor AD server that no one likes?
Airlines need more than just servers to operate. They also need laptops for various ground crew, terminals for the gate crew and ticketing agents, desktops for the people in offices outside the airport who manage “stuff” needed to keep an airline running.You seem to be much more interested in talking about Linux being better than windows, which is a statement I agree with, but it’s quite different from your original point that “Delta is at fault because they used third party tools”.
My point was that it’s unreasonable to say that Delta should have known better than to use a third party tool, while recommending Linux (not written by Delta), whose ecosystem is almost entirely composed of different third parties that you need to trust, either via system software (webserver), holding your critical data (database), kernel code (network card makers usually add support by making a kernel patch), or entire architectural subsystems (eBPF was written by a company that sells services that use it, and a good chunk of the security system was the NSA).
None of that bothers me. I just don’t get how it doesn’t bother you if you don’t trust well regarded vendors in kernel space to have those same vendors making kernel patches.
I can’t wait to see crowdstrike get liquidated from all of this, MSOFT is getting so much flak when this straight up wasn’t their fault
Why would they be liquidated?
Inability to pay the settlements on the inevitable lawsuits that will be coming their way for halting the world economy for a day
I’m sure their Terms of Service make it clear they have limited liability or need to go to arbitration.
Yea because that always holds up in court. I’m sure every legal team will claim the lack of QA was gross negligence on Crowdstrikes part and that normally allows vast portions of agreements to be nullified as one party clearly didn’t hold up their end of the deal
Crowdstrike wouldn’t have a business model if the security of Microsoft Windows wasn’t so awful. Microsoft isn’t directly to blame for this, but they’re not blameless either.
Windows defender for enterprise is a strong competitor in that market, and CISO that went with crowdstrike did it because the crowdstrike sales team hosts really great lunches and sponsors lots of sports teams
Their stock is at +44% since July 2023, they might be fine
Pure gambling
The reboot 15 times solution, etc it is a bit on their side. But in general I agree, CrowdStrike and the industries that need that kind of service should know better.
Crowdstrike offers layered rollouts, but some executive declined this because they want the most up to date software at all times.
Not for the rapid update that broke everything.
See post incident report:
How Do We Prevent This From Happening Again?
Software Resiliency and Testing
-
Improve Rapid Response Content testing by using testing types such as:
-
Local developer testing
-
Content update and rollback testing
-
Stress testing, fuzzing and fault injection
-
Stability testing
-
Content interface testing
-
Add additional validation checks to the Content Validator for Rapid Response Content.
-
A new check is in process to guard against this type of problematic content from being deployed in the future.
-
Enhance existing error handling in the Content Interpreter.
Rapid Response Content Deployment
-
Implement a staggered deployment strategy for Rapid Response Content in which updates are gradually deployed to larger portions of the sensor base, starting with a canary deployment.
-
Improve monitoring for both sensor and system performance, collecting feedback during Rapid Response Content deployment to guide a phased rollout.
-
Provide customers with greater control over the delivery of Rapid Response Content updates by allowing granular selection of when and where these updates are deployed.
-
Provide content update details via release notes, which customers can subscribe to.
Source: https://www.crowdstrike.com/falcon-content-update-remediation-and-guidance-hub/
-
Good. They’ve been stealing from their customers for decades; this is fuckin’ karmic.
Also, maybe don’t put all your eggs into one single basket, from an infrastructure perspective.
Yeah, I say I as migrate another service to Azure…
That’s not just putting all your eggs into a single basket, that’s putting all your eggs into a rotting trashcan
Tell me you haven’t used Azure without telling me you haven’t used Azure.
Is Azure is fine. It is not amazing, it is not terrible, it is fine.
Our c-level team was super excited to announce we were migrating from AWS to Azure. “This is going to be so great for our infrastructure team!” The infrastructure team groaned. “But Azure is so much better!” Yeah, it’s fine. It’s all pros and cons. But migration sucks.
It’s like, we have sales people. We sell software. They know the software sales process. They know that sales is all pros, no cons. They know that the team that took them to dinner and golfing and gave them swag wouldn’t know an API from an APU. They know that migration is a major pain point. Why would they expect enthusiasm from the team that has to do it?
But they’re excited about it. It’s gonna be great.
Revenge for the times they messed up my travel plans.
Don’t worry everyone… Each and everyone of the CEOs involved in this debacle will earn millions this year and next and will eventually retire with more money they could possible spend in 10 lifetimes
If anything, they’ll continue to fall upwards completely deserving even more money
Additionally, don’t worry, they’ll just shift more costs onto the consumer and ultimately widen their profit-margins in no time.
Perhaps Boeing can save the airline industry a little more by lowering the costs of their planes by removing another bolt and jerry-rigging flight software onto an antiquated platform.
Aw that’s a shame. Poor rich company.
No, POOR PLANNING and allowing an external entity the ability to take you down, that’s what did it. Pretend you’re pros, Delta, and be adequate.
Holy halfwit projection, batman.
The stories I could tell about how companies will hire a team to run tests on their digital and physical systems while also limiting access to outside nodes disconnected or screened from their core, primary, IMPORTANT systems.
Kicker is that plenty of people who work for these companies get it. Very rarely does someone in a position to do something about it actually understand. A few thousand dollars and they could have hired a hat or two to run penetration on systems and fixed the vulnerabilities, or at least shored them up so this fucking 000 bug didn’t impact them so harshly.
But naaaaaaah. Gotta cut payroll, brb.
I’m not sure any kind of pentest would prevent crowdstrikes backdoor access to release updates at its own discretion and cadence. The only way to avoid that would be blocking crowdstrike from accessing the Internet but I’d bet they’d 100% brick the host over letting that happen. If anything this is a good lesson in not installing malware to prevent even worse malware. You handed the keys to your security to a party that clearly doesn’t care and paid the price. My reaction to that legal disclaimer of crowdstrikes stating they take no responsibility for anything they do… responsibility is the only reason anyone would buy anything from them (aside from being forced by legal requirements that clearly didn’t have anyone who understood them involved in the legislation).
I know it seems shocking but some companies do and did plan for backup systems in the event their entire windows platform blue screened. Thats why there were some companies that had a hard time with it and some that didnt.
The original poster is correct that Delta should shoulder some of the blame. The outage caused a problem but it was Deltas response that caused 500 million in damages. I’m sure that CrowdPoint didn’t advise Delta to put all their eggs in one basket did they?
Bah… you’re right. I’ve just become so disillusioned by the smoke and mirrors. So many critical systems protected by poorly managed file mazes and a prayer that Susan in accounting doesn’t get anything higher than the digital equivalent of a toddler slamming its face onto a keyboard several times email from bos$6&776ggjskbigman@poorlyspelledcompany.bendover because some 13 year old with computer access got clever.
I’m a bit agitated atm, sorry about that.
But at least a door didn’t just fall off a plane. That’s already fixed in windows 11 the shitwagon release.
