The airline bore the brunt of the damage after a flawed update from a cybersecurity firm plunged its Windows machines into a blue screen of death (BSOD). While other airlines recovered after a few days, Delta was still canceling flights after five days. In total, the company had to cancel more than 5,000 flights and pay compensation.

"Delta has a significant number of applications that use its systems, and one crew tracking-related tool in particular was affected and was unable to effectively handle the unprecedented number of changes caused by the system shutdown," Bastian wrote at the time He wrote at the time.

In an interview with CNBC this week, Bastian pulled no punches when asked about his thoughts on Microsoft after the July 19 outage. He described Windows as "probably the most fragile platform" and asked, "When was the last major failure at Apple?"

According to Bastian, the CrowdStrike failure affected 40,000 servers that "had to be physically touched and reset."

While the CrowdStrike update was not inherently Microsoft's fault, Redmond undoubtedly had to deal with blowback from the incident. The company moved quickly to issue fixes and solutions that IT engineers could implement after the damage was done. But the company also felt the need to shift blame and explain why Apple did not suffer the same fate.

According to a Wall Street Journal report, "A Microsoft spokesman said the company could not legally blockade its operating system in the same way Apple did because it reached an agreement with the European Commission after being sued. "In 2009, Microsoft agreed to give manufacturers of security software the same level of access to Windows that Microsoft gets."

In 2020, Apple notified developers that its macOS operating system would not give them kernel-level access. This would prevent a blue screen-of-death scenario from occurring. Meanwhile, Delta Air Lines is facing a federal investigation for failing to adequately address the outage.