CrowdStrike Says It Shouldn’t Be Blamed for Delta’s Cancellation

The issue is heating up between CrowdStrike and Delta Airlines amid a possible lawsuit against the technology company after the July outage that led to the cancellation of thousands of Delta flights.

On Sunday, CrowdStrike attorney Michael Carlinsky reportedly wrote to Delta Airlines attorney David Boies that Delta’s threat of a lawsuit “contributed to the misleading narrative that CrowdStrike is responsible for Delta’s IT decisions and response to this outage.”

The letter alleges that CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz reached out to Delta CEO Ed Bastian during the crisis to “offer local assistance, but he did not respond,” according to CNBC.

Related: Read Memo from CrowdStrike Explaining Massive IT Outage

Carlinsky also said that if Delta moves forward with the lawsuit, the airline will have to “explain to the public, its shareholders, and ultimately to a judge why CrowdStrike took responsibility for its actions — promptly, transparently, and constructively — while Delta did not.”

Last week, Bastian spoke to “Squawk Box” and said the airline had “no choice” but to seek damages following the incident.

“We have to protect our shareholders,” said Bastian in the program. “We have to protect our customers, our employees, from damages, not only from their costs, but also from product, reputation damage.”

The CrowdStrike update caused widespread disruption to Microsoft-owned devices and internal problems at Delta, affecting one of the airline’s top employee tracking tools.

Delta reportedly lost between $350 million and $500 million during the outage and canceled about 7,000 flights.

Related: Delta Hires Celebrity Lawyer, Seeks CrowdStrike Compensation

Delta has not disclosed how much it will seek in compensation from CrowdStrike, and the lawsuit has not yet been officially filed. Still, Bastian told employees in an internal memo last Friday that the airline “plans to pursue legal claims” against the tech company.

Delta Airlines is down more than 15.5% year-to-date as of Tuesday afternoon.