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Delta Air Lines vs. CrowdStrike: How The Airline Was

Delta Air Lines vs. CrowdStrike: How The Airline Was Crippled By A Software Bug

#Delta #Air #Lines #CrowdStrike #Airline

“Long Haul by Simple Flying”

Well, it looks like the dust has mostly settled in the dispute between Delta Air Lines and IT company CrowdStrike. This allows us to give a fairly comprehensive summary of everything that happened.

As you may remember, CrowdStrike’s erroneous software update in July caused a near-global…

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15 Comments

  1. The old console based scheduling system is probably the root cause of the cascading disruption. Most other airlines probably had a browser based application where they just needed a browser and VPN.

  2. Crowdstrike software runs in kernel mode, which means that when it tries to execute illegal instruction, access non existent memory or even divide by 0, the system cannot intercept this and kill only that process, the whole system goes down. And since the software starts early in the bot process, it would crash eveytime it booted.
    The flaw here is that the kernel mode software accepted unverified data from the internet without a user level software parsing it for validity before passing it to the kernel level software. This ia a bad design from Crowdsrike and bad decision from Delta for rellying on sofware from a company that doesn't know about basic precautions for kernel mode code.
    Each machine had to be rebooted with equivalent of special keypresses to avoid loading extensions after which you coudl delete the offending file and reboot normally. (this was documented early during the night by Crowdstrike). Remains to be seen if Delta IT staff were at work fixing the problem as soon as the fix was docuented or whether the fix started during regular work hours.

  3. My takeaway from this utterly preventable and foreseeable calamity? Delta’s garbage CEO complains bitterly regarding Cloudstrike’s indifference is only matched by Delta’s passengers complaint bitterly about the airline’s indifference. Did I mention this was preventable?

  4. I think more than anything this should open up folks eyes on how few company’s can cause chaos around the world.. Just imagine if cloudflare ever had an outage %16 percent of the internet disrupted by one company

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