Hacker News Reader

Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

Delta's revenue is only $58.05 billion in 20213. I'm not sure how a day or two of canceled flights is going to be anywhere near $5.4B.

View on HN

Crowdstrike's impact was more than Delta's cancelled flights? How did you arrive at the conclusion it was limited to Delta?

Even still, Delta had a really bad time recovering, and is still cancelling flights days later. It's not just "a day or two". At a billion a week, with 30-40% cancellation rates, that's 300-400M just for this one customer. And that's just lost revenue. Imagine the extra costs: customer service complaints, hardware / IT restoration, extra wages for flight attendants working double duty to keep the remaining flights going. Madness.

Even just in travel segment, how many hotels, car rentals, uber/lyft rides, etc were cancelled b/c of missed flights? How much do you think they paid on top of the lost revenue to handle customer complaints, IT restoration, etc?

The repair costs alone at a given airport must be staggering, as every terminal screen is BSOD and needs a tech to manually restore from bitlocker.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/delta-flight-cancellations-toda...

Well the comment I replied to didn't event try to quantify the total impact, and only mentioned delta flights being canceled. There might be a bazillion other ways it can add up to $5.4B, but "flights Delta cancelled and will be on the hook to refund" does not come anywhere close to justifying that number.

Delta only started to recover today, so it’s more like 4-5 days of canceled flights. Not saying it’s a huge difference but 1-2 greatly underplays how bad it was for people flying Delta vs any other airline.

Most of that was due to knock on impacts. The Delta scheduling software couldn’t handle the number of changes that were being to staff schedules, and routes, and flights due to the impacts of the CrowdStrike outage.

Way more than delta flights were grounded. If you include all the hours lost by all those people and assign some monetary value it's probably more than that. Not only that, but all the hospitals. God forbid someone died because of it. Surprised crowd strike isn't bankrupt

the hospitals alone are reasons to excoriate CS, airlines notwithstanding

It's more like a week of downtime which totals to about a billion based on the data you brought in.

So, just one of the affected companies brings the total to $1B, wouldn't you say $5B is actually a low estimate?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com