- 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.”
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.
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 don’t bother doing it at all.
Edit: Bonus unnecessary word
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.