Good morning. Three days after a faulty update from CrowdStrike hobbled Delta Air Lines, the tech company’s chief executive wanted to talk to his counterpart at the airline, Ed Bastian.

But a senior Delta executive cautioned that it might not be the best time. “Ed is not in a good place right now,” the Delta employee emailed to a CrowdStrike executive.

• Slow recovery: Airlines around the world started grounding flights early on July 19 after CrowdStrike dispatched a faulty update to its Falcon antivirus software that crashed millions of computers running Microsoft’s Windows system. Within a couple of days, most other carriers were back to normal flying. The Atlanta-based carrier that prides itself on running the industry’s most reliable operation was still in disarray. In the five days following the outage, it canceled 7,000 flights, a sharply higher total than its peers.
   
• Finger pointing: Over a month later, Delta, CrowdStrike and Microsoft are locked in a heated battle over who broke the airline’s “on-time machine.” The companies have traded public barbs on who is responsible for the episode, which dented Delta’s reputation and drew the ire of passengers and federal officials.
   
• Breaking with brand image: Delta spent years crafting its image to stand out from its peers. Executives boast about the airline’s ability to charge a premium for a reliable flying experience.
   
• More than meets the eye? Delta executives said the airline’s heavy reliance on CrowdStrike and Microsoft—which it regarded as industry gold standards—put it at a disadvantage versus rivals. The tech companies say that doesn’t explain Delta’s delayed recovery.

Europe’s top court rebukes competition regulator, curbing powers.

Europe’s top court rebuked European Union competition regulators for overreach in a ruling that is set to curb the bloc’s powers to target smaller takeovers.

The ruling. The European Court of Justice said Tuesday the EU’s competition authority lacked jurisdiction to review U.S. gene-sequencing company Illumina’s takeover of cancer-test maker Grail and that the legal tool it relied on to look at the case was used improperly.

The implications. Illumina has since unwound Grail, but the legal case was nonetheless watched closely because of its implications for the EU’s approach to policing deals that fall below the bloc’s and member states’ traditional thresholds for review.

Credit-rating providers settle with SEC over off-channel communication violations.

Six credit-rating providers, including Moody’s Investors Service and S&P Global Ratings, agreed to pay a total of $49 million in civil penalties in the latest settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission over the use of so-called off-channel communications.

The SEC found that since at least January 2020, employees of both Moody’s and S&P communicated about credit ratings by text message using mobile devices and other messaging platforms such as WhatsApp, and both firms failed to adequately maintain and preserve records of those conversations.

• Molson Coors, the maker of Coors Light and Miller beers, is the latest company to pull some of its diversity policies and initiatives.
   
• China is planning to open investigations into some agricultural and chemical imports from Canada, adding to rising trade frictions between the two countries.
   
• China’s Alibaba Group will offer payment services from rival Tencent on its biggest online marketplaces, a milestone toward breaking down the walls dividing Chinese internet giants.
   
• Kamala Harris has voiced her opposition to Nippon Steel’s pending purchase of U.S. Steel. The latter's CEO said it would close steel mills and likely move its headquarters out of Pittsburgh if the sale collapses.
   
• Antitrust enforcers will go for the knockout punch this week against Kroger’s planned acquisition of Albertsons.
   
• Lebanon’s former central-bank governor was arrested Tuesday in Beirut on embezzlement charges, as the political establishment looks to head off new international sanctions that could further cripple the economy.
   
• A former aide to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul helped a Chinese official eavesdrop on a conference call and forged the governor’s signature as part of a lucrative scheme to advance Beijing’s interests, according to a federal indictment unsealed Tuesday.

Hamas’s threats to kill hostages could weaken group’s hand in negotiations.

Hamas’s threat to execute more hostages if Israel tries further rescues is a double-edged sword for the Palestinian militant group, which wants to increase pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for a cease-fire, but risks costing itself one of its most valuable bargaining chips.

The U.S.-designated terrorist group’s threat comes as it tries to negotiate for its own survival after months of punishing warfare and as both sides press demands to end the war in Gaza.

• U.S. Effort to Broker Mideast Cease-Fire Gets a New Sense of Urgency
• U.K. Ban on Some Weapons to Israel Signals Diplomatic Shift

Microsoft rolled out AI PCs that can’t play top games—and there’s no quick fix.

The latest Windows personal computers with artificial-intelligence features have “the best specs” on “all the benchmarks,” Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella recently said. There is one problem: The chips inside current models are incompatible with many leading videogames.

The scale: The problem is widespread. About 1,300 PC games have been independently tested to see if they work on Microsoft’s new Arm-powered PCs and only about half ran smoothly, said James McWhirter, an analyst with research firm Omdia.

• Two Russian ballistic missiles hit a military institute and a hospital in a central Ukrainian city, killing 51 and injuring 271 in the deadliest strike this year, Ukrainian officials said.
   
• Chinese government-backed trolls are targeting U.S. voters ahead of the 2024 presidential election, assuming fake identities of politically engaged voters on social media to promote divisive narratives, according to new research.
   
• A strike by more than 15,000 AT&T workers in the Southeast is stretching into a third week after a federal mediation process to end the standoff broke down.
   
• Stocks tumbled Tuesday after renewed worries about a slowing economy gripped investors, echoing a sharp selloff that rattled global financial markets just a month ago.
   
• Asian chip stocks took a hit on Wednesday as markets were unnerved by artificial-intelligence chip giant Nvidia’s slump overnight and renewed fears of an economic slowdown.
   
• Australia’s commodity-rich economy recorded its weakest growth momentum since the early 1990s in the second quarter, as consumers and businesses continued to feel the impact of high interest rates.

White House takes aim at internet security.

The White House wants to use the federal government’s buying power to speed the adoption of security controls at the heart of the global internet, a yearslong ambition for computer engineers and one in which the U.S. has lagged behind other countries.

A road map published Tuesday would see the government address decades-old vulnerabilities in the internet’s core function known as border gateway protocols. They allow the roughly 74,000 networks making up the web to route traffic.

• Vice President Kamala Harris will propose a tenfold-expansion of a tax deduction for new small businesses and announce a goal of 25 million new small-business applications in her first term if elected president, according to campaign officials.
   
• Pro-Palestinian protesters returned to Columbia University on the first day of classes, presenting a fresh challenge for school officials.
   
• Small businesses are job creators. New businesses aren’t creating as many of them.
   
• Several Ukrainian ministers, including the country’s top diplomat, have submitted resignations as part of a reshuffle that President Volodymyr Zelensky said is designed to reboot his government.
   
• Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said his country should serve as an example for the rest of the world on how to deal with Elon Musk after its Supreme Court voted to uphold a ban on the billionaire’s social-media platform X.
   
• Amid a labor shortage in Japan, some employers are rebuffing resignations. A new field is helping workers bust free.

Follow us on X at @WSJRisk. Follow Risk & Compliance editor David Smagalla @DSmagalla_DJ and reporters Mengqi Sun @_MengqiSun, Dylan Tokar @dgtokar and Richard Vanderford @VanderfordRich.

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