AirAsia’s Tony Fernandes wants Microsoft compensation for the CrowdStrike outage: ‘If I delay my flight, you would come after me for a refund’

Queues of passengers at the AirAsia check-in counters at Don Mueang Airport in Bangkok on July 20, 2024. A significant global outage on July 19 affected Microsoft services. — Getty Images/The New York Times

On July 19, a flawed update from US cybersecurity company CrowdStrike crashed Windows PCs all over the world, with computers displaying the dreaded “blue screen of death”.

The outage hit global airlines particularly hard, disrupting thousands of flights as staff scrambled to get systems back online. Some airlines, like US carrier Delta Air Lines, are still struggling.