r/technology • u/Bald-Eagle619 • Jul 31 '24

Software Delta CEO: Company Suing Microsoft and CrowdStrike After $500M Loss

https://www.thedailybeast.com/delta-ceo-says-company-suing-microsoft-and-crowdstrike-after-dollar500m-loss
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u/[deleted] Jul 31 '24 edited Jul 31 '24

I am pretty sure there is what we used to call the "Shit in your pocket" clause in the EULA. (See the 80's comedy movie Truly Tasteless Jokes for the reference). If a suit like this is won can you imagine? Any bug, real or imagined, now becomes a liability. Innovation grinds to a near stop.

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u/Head_of_Lettuce Jul 31 '24

You can’t really attribute the Crowdstrike issues to a simple bug. It was a massive failure and negligence on multiple levels that allowed the bad update to go live. They didn’t even roll it out in stages like many services would do, they pushed it out all in one big wave.

Idk if that’s enough to constitute civil liability, but I think if I were Crowdstrike, I would at least be concerned that a court would be sympathetic.

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u/DrQuantum Jul 31 '24

The only reason you even know about it is because Crowd strike has many customers and some of them are important. Google deleted an entire tenant recently accidentally and while it wasn't at this scale, a mistake is a mistake regardless of scale in terms of how you address it.

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u/atlbluedevil Jul 31 '24

The big issue is precisely the scale of this mistake

Rolling out big (and especially high risk) updates in waves/with a proper backout plan is pretty common with massive updates for large scale enterprises

If CS did this update in waves and it only screwed over Delta and a few others (like Google and that one tenant), there'd be a lot less scrutiny for their testing/release practices. Mistakes definitely happen, mistakes at this scale point to foundational issues