Delta Air Lines and the United Airlines Airlines: The Footprints of a Software-Defined Cyber Attack on the Southwest Airlines Network

Delta was forced to cancel over 3000 flights from Friday to Sunday as a result of the Friday outage, according to a letter released Sunday by the CEO. Bastian said the outage occurred on what was considered the airline’s “busiest travel weekend of the summer.”

Several Delta applications run on Microsoft Windows, causing many of the tools to be impacted in the outage, according to the public letter. The airline was forced to temporarily stop using one of its crew tracking tools because it was unable to process the unprecedented number of changes triggered by the system shutdown.

The airline offered travel waivers to customers on flights impacted by the outage, allowing them to change itineraries and rebook their flights without any added fees.

Hundreds of complaints have been filed with USDOT regarding unacceptable customer service conditions at Delta Air Lines. I have made clear to Delta that we will hold them to all applicable passenger protections,” Buttigieg wrote.

Customers are not obligated to accept the travel credit offered to rebook flights, but instead they are entitled to a prompt cash refund under new federal regulations.

“We have made clear to Delta that they must take care of their passengers and honor their customer service commitments,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a statement Tuesday.

The DOT said in a statement that it imposed the largest civil penalty in the agency’s history on Southwest.

In a statement to NPR, Delta Air Lines acknowledged the Department of Transportation’s notice of the investigation and said it is “fully cooperating” with the department.

“We will make sure that the rights of Delta’s passengers are upheld, as this is the law and we have power to do so,” he said.

“We remain entirely focused on restoring our operation after cybersecurity vendor CrowdStrike’s faulty Windows update rendered IT systems across the globe inoperable,” the airline said in its statement, adding that teams are constantly working to get its operations back to normal.

A flawed software update from the CrowdStrike group knocked millions of Microsoft users offline. The problem was not a cyberattack but a software glitch according to CrowdStrike. After identifying the issue, the company said it withdrew the “problematic channel file” that affected customers’ systems.