Delta CEO says global tech outage cost airline $500M

Delta CEO Ed Bastian said the recent global tech outage cost his company $500 million after the airline suffered major flight delays and cancellations.

“This cost us a half a billion dollars,” Bastian said Wednesday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” 

“Over a period of five days, between not just the lost revenue, but the tens of millions of dollars per day in compensation and hotels and — we did everything we could to take care of our customers over that time frame,” Bastian said.

While multiple airlines had issues with technology around the time of the July 19 outage, Delta faced large numbers of cancellations in the days following.

The mass cancellations sparked scrutiny from the Department of Transportation, with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg saying officials aimed to ensure Delta was "following the law and taking care of its passengers."

The global outage was linked to an update from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike that crashed computers running Windows software. While the cyber firm rolled out a rapid fix, it took long periods for impacted customers to recover.

Thousands of Delta flights were canceled or delayed in the days following the outage. Delta announced July 24 that its operations had almost fully returned to normal, with zero canceled mainline flights.