Delta Airlines’ CEO has questioned the reliability of Microsoft and CrowdStrike by praising Apple’s own.
In an interview with CNBC, Delta Airlines CEO Ed Bastian asked, “When was the last time you heard of a big outage at Apple?” leaving the interviewer at a near loss for words. For those unfamiliar, Microsoft and CrowdStrike experienced a near-catastrophic failure on July 18 due to a faulty update which caused Windows PCs to crash. This led to computers shutting down across airports, stores, and more, resulting in huge flight delays worldwide.
At the time, CrowdStrike’s CEO, George Kurtz, posted on X that “Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted.” This statement likely gave Delta Airlines’ CEO pause for thought and could have led to his remarks about Apple’s reliability on CNBC. Nevertheless, Microsoft and CrowdStrike are still dealing with the fallout of this huge disruption, and with comments like these from Delta’s CEO, the saga isn’t likely to end anytime soon.
Apple has had outages, but not on CrowdStrike’s scale
Despite the Delta CEO’s comments, Apple’s outage track record isn’t perfect — though rare, it too has suffered downtime to its services from time to time. In the past, you may have been unable to use some of Apple’s services, such as iCloud or Apple Arcade. You can check if some of these services are affected by going to Apple’s System Status page, which labels all its systems in green or yellow, indicating whether something is available or experiencing issues. A recent example of an unavailable service was iCloud Private Relay, part of Apple’s iCloud Plus subscription service, which helps to make the best iPhones, iPads, and Macs more secure when browsing the web. Toward the end of July, this service was down for a few days.
In April, there was a more severe issue when the App Store, Apple Music, and Apple TV Plus services were down worldwide. This outage lasted several hours, but something on this scale from Apple hadn’t happened before. Despite these significant outages, they still don’t compare to the failures made by Microsoft and CrowdStrike.
Ultimately, the praise from Delta Airlines’ CEO for Apple may spur Microsoft and CrowdStrike to take action to improve their security practices, ensuring that incidents like the one in July won’t happen again.