Delta Air Lines struggled to recover from the crisis for a fourth straight day. a global technological failure caused by a faulty software updatestranding tens of thousands of passengers and attracting unwanted attention from the federal government.
The airline's chief executive said it would be “a few more days” before “the worst is clearly behind us.” Delta's chief information officer said Monday that the airline was still trying to get a vital crew planning program up and running.
Other carriers were returning to near-normal levels of service disruption, intensifying the glare The delta is relatively smaller response to the outage that hit airlines, hospitals and businesses around the world.
Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg spoke to Delta Airline CEO Ed Bastian addressed the high number of flight cancellations since Friday on Sunday. Buttigieg said his agency has received “hundreds of complaints” about Delta, and he expects the airline to provide hotel rooms and meals to delayed travelers and quickly refund customers who don’t want to be rescheduled for a later flight.
“No one should be stuck in an airport overnight or on hold for hours to speak to a customer service agent,” Buttigieg said. He pledged to help Delta passengers by enforcing air travel rules. consumer protection rules.
Bastian said in a video to employees that he told Buttigieg: “You don’t have to remind me. I know that because we do our best, especially in difficult times, to take care of our customers.”
Delta has canceled more than 5,500 flights since the outage began Friday morning, including at least 700 flights canceled Monday, according to aviation data provider Cirium. Delta and its regional subsidiaries accounted for about two-thirds of all cancellations worldwide Monday, including nearly all of those in the United States.
United Airlines has been the worst-hit airline since the outage began, canceling nearly 1,500 flights. As of late Monday morning, United had canceled just 17 flights.
Other airlines affected by the first wave of groundings also resumed normal operations Monday. They include American Airlines, Spirit Airlines, Frontier Airlines and Allegiant Air.
Bastian, Delta's CEO, said in a message to customers Sunday that the airline was continuing to restore operations that had been disrupted. One of the tools Delta uses to track crews was affected and was unable to process the high number of changes triggered by the outage.
“The technical issue occurred during the busiest weekend of the summer, with a booking rate above 90%, which limited our replenishment capabilities,” Bastian wrote. Booking rate is the percentage of seats sold on each flight.
Airlines have large, multi-layered technology systems, and crew tracking programs are often among the oldest. When the outage began Friday, it also affected systems used to check in passengers and make pre-flight calculations about the weight and balance of planes, the airlines said. United and American reported intermittent problems communicating with crews in flight, contributing to their decisions to briefly suspend all flights.
Some airlines, including Southwest and Alaska, do not use CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity software whose faulty upgrade to Microsoft Windows triggered the outages. These operators have seen relatively few cancellations.
Delta, however, said that “more than half” of its computer systems were Windows-based. The airline said the outage required IT workers to manually repair and reboot each affected system and synchronize applications to work together.
“It will be a few more days before we are able to say that … the worst is clearly behind us,” Bastian told employees Monday. “Today will be a better day than yesterday, and I hope Tuesday and Wednesday will be even better.”
In the same video, Delta Chief Information Officer Rahul Samant said two applications were particularly difficult to restart Friday: one that manages traffic at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, Delta's largest hub, and another that assigns pilots and flight attendants to flights.
Technicians have implemented the shift scheduling program, “but we have some catching up to do” and new problems continue to arise, Samant said.
Atlanta-based Delta said it was offer exemptions to make it easier for customers to reschedule their trips.
That wasn’t much help for Jason Helmes, a fitness trainer trying to get home to Detroit from Denver. His Sunday flight was delayed three times before being canceled; by the time the plane finally left the gate, the pilots were already at the end of their legally mandated shift.
“Everyone was stuck. No information about hotels. No information about what to do next,” Helmes said. “They told me, ‘Go down to the baggage carousel, your bags should be there.’ There were thousands of bags there. I found my bags, I was lucky.”
Helmes said Delta offered to rebook him on Wednesday, but he was worried that flight would also be canceled. He booked a return flight Tuesday on Frontier Airlines, one of the airlines that has largely recovered. He’s holding on to his receipts, including a hotel room, in hopes Delta will refund him.
“I’ve been exclusively on Delta for 10 years,” he said. “It makes me think twice.”
The collapse of the Delta is reminiscent of that of December 2022 debacle that prompted Southwest Airlines to cancel nearly 17,000 flights over a 15-day period. After a federal investigation into Southwest's compliance with consumer protection rules, the airline agreed to pay a $35 million fine as part of a $140 million settlement with the Ministry of Transport.
Southwest's outage began during a winter storm, but the airline recovery took unusually long due to problems with the crew scheduling system, a striking similarity to Delta's current mess.
THE airline industry Microsoft is perhaps the most visible victim of the global tech woes caused by Texas-based cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike’s faulty software update. Microsoft said the problem affected 8.5 million machines. CrowdStrike says it has rolled out a patch, but experts say it could take days or even weeks to fix. each affected computer.
