A Georgia state judge gave Delta Air Lines the legal go-ahead for its lawsuit against cybersecurity company Crowdstrike for the computer outage it caused in July 2024, which caused the airline to cancel 7,000 flights.?

According to Reuters, the decision was made by Judge Kelly Lee Ellerbe of the Fulton County Superior Court. Judge Lee Ellerbe ruled the airline could try to prove that CrowdStrike was negligent in its defective update, which caused over eight million Microsoft Windows-based computers to crash simultaneously.?

Delta was also approved to pursue a computer trespass claim.

"Delta has specifically pled that if CrowdStrike had tested the July update on one computer before its deployment, the programming error would have been detected," the judge wrote. "As CrowdStrike has acknowledged, its own president publicly stated CrowdStrike did something 'horribly wrong.'"

CrowdStrike maintains its innocence of Delta's accusation of negligence.

There have been several lawsuits around CrowdStrike and Delta Air Lines following the outage¡ªDelta announced its lawsuit just a few months after the incident. At the same time, travelers who were impacted launched their own against CrowdStrike, seeking reparation for the damage caused worldwide.?

Delta was the carrier most affected by the outage, reporting a $550 million loss in revenue and disrupting travel for 1.4 million fliers. The impacted passengers are also suing the airline, claiming Delta illegally refused to issue full refunds.?

While Delta blames CrowdStrike for the thousands of canceled flights, CrowdStrike maintained that, while the outage occurred, Delta is to blame for how many Delta flights were impacted, even claiming that Delta refused help from Microsoft during the outage.?

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