By Jonathan Stempel

(Reuters) -Delta Air Lines can pursue much of its lawsuit seeking to hold cybersecurity company CrowdStrike liable for a massive computer outage last July that caused the carrier to cancel 7,000 flights, a Georgia state judge ruled.

In a decision on Friday, Judge Kelly Lee Ellerbe of the Fulton County Superior Court said Delta can try to prove CrowdStrike was grossly negligent in pushing a defective update of its Falcon software to customers, crashing more than 8 million Microsoft Windows-based computers worldwide.

"Delta has specifically pled that if CrowdStrike had tested the July update on one computer before its deployment, the programming error would have been detected," the judge wrote. "As CrowdStrike has acknowledged, its own president publicly stated CrowdStrike did something 'horribly wrong.'"

The Atlanta-based judge also let Delta pursue a computer trespass claim, and a narrowed claim that CrowdStrike fraudulently promised not to introduce an "unauthorized back door" into the carrier's computers.

In a statement on Monday, CrowdStrike's lawyer Michael Carlinsky said he was confident the judge will find Delta's case has no merit, or will limit damages to the "single-digit millions of dollars" under Georgia law.

Delta, based in Atlanta, said it was pleased with the decision and remained confident in the merits of its case.

The carrier sued Austin, Texas-based CrowdStrike three months after the July 19, 2024 outage disrupted travel for 1.4 million Delta passengers.

Delta has said the outage cost $550 million in lost revenue and added expenses, offset by $50 million of fuel savings.

On May 6, a federal judge in Atlanta said Delta must face a proposed class action by passengers whose said it unlawfully refused full refunds after the outage upended their travel.

The outage also disrupted other airlines, but those disruptions eased faster.

The case is Delta Air Lines Inc v CrowdStrike Inc, Georgia Superior Court, Fulton County, No. 24CV013621.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New YorkEditing by Nick Zieminski)

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