“The impact on Delta passengers was disastrous,” says the lawsuit, which is seeking certification as a class action. “Delta’s failure to recover from the CrowdStrike outage left passengers stranded in airports across the country and the world and, in many cases, thousands of miles from home.”
Delta Air Lines passengers have filed a lawsuit against the carrier, claiming that it refused to provide refunds or offer reasonable accommodations to travelers affected by last month’s CrowdStrike software failure.
“The impact on Delta passengers was disastrous,” says the lawsuit, which is seeking certification as a class action. “Delta’s failure to recover from the CrowdStrike outage left passengers stranded in airports across the country and the world and, in many cases, thousands of miles from home.”
Attorneys for the plaintiffs claim that Delta refused to authorize refunds for some passengers and, in certain other cases, would only offer partial reimbursement to travelers who agreed to sign waivers releasing the airline from any future legal claims.
Delta also purportedly declined to cover additional travel-related expenses or provide vouchers for meals, hotel rooms, and ground transportation—forcing customers to “spend thousands of dollars in unexpected expenses.”
The lawsuit intends to “secure refunds for each and every similarly situated consumer Delta has wronged.”
One of the travelers listed as a plaintiff said that they were flying from Denver to Amsterdam.
Their departing flight and their return flight were both canceled, leading them to make separate bookings with another airline. Delta told the plaintiff that they would receive an automatic refund, but were told 10 days later that they would have to submit a request.
“On July 31, 2024, Plaintiff submitted two refund requests: one for the original canceled flight and one for his out of pocket expenses,” the lawsuit says. “In response, Delta offered a $100 voucher to use towards a future flight with Delta. The out-of-pocket expenses reportedly totaled nearly $2,000.”
Other plaintiffs shared similar stories: one said that they had to take a Greyhound bus back home, while another claimed to have missed an anniversary cruise that had cost about $10,000.
“When our clients sought refunds,” attorney Joseph Sauder said, “Delta again failed to deliver.”
Delta, for its part, has blamed many of its outage-related troubles on CrowdStrike.
Earlier this week, Delta CEO Ed Bastian said that the company lost more than $500 million as a direct result of the outage—and is now actively preparing to file its own claims against CrowdStrike and Microsoft.
“We are pursuing legal claims against CrowdStrike and Microsoft to recover damages caused by the outage,” Bastian said.
But Microsoft and CrowdStrike both say that Delta’s ability to respond to the outage was compromised by its allegedly outdated “IT infrastructure.”
“In fact,” CrowdStrike attorneys wrote in a recent letter, “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, not Microsoft Windows or Azure.”
Sources
Delta facing class action lawsuit over tech outage; customers seeking refunds
Delta passengers sue airline for refusing refunds after massive tech outage
Delta passengers sue airline over refund refusals after CrowdStrike meltdown
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