Delta Air Lines struggled for a fourth straight day to recover from a global outage caused by a faulty software update, stranding tens of thousands of passengers and attracting unwanted attention from the government of the corporation.
The airline’s chief executive said it would be “a few more days” before “the worst is behind us.” Delta’s chief information officer said Monday that the airline is trying to fix a critical crew scheduling program.
Other carriers were returning to normal levels of service disruptions, adding to the spotlight on Delta’s lackluster response to the collapse of airlines, hospitals and businesses around the world.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg spoke with Delta CEO Ed Bastian on Sunday about the high number of flight cancellations since Friday. Buttigieg said his agency has received “hundreds of complaints” about Delta, and he expects the airline to provide hotels and meals for delayed passengers and provide expedited payments to customers who do not want to be put back on the flight. coming.
Buttigieg said: “No one should have to be stranded at the airport at night or wait for hours to speak with a customer service representative. He vowed to help Delta passengers by enforcing the t consumer protection for air travel.
Bastian said in a staff video that he told Buttigieg, “You don’t need to remind me. I know, because we do everything we can, especially in difficult times, to take care of our customers.”
Delta has canceled more than 5,500 flights since the season began Friday morning, including at least 700 canceled flights Monday, according to flight data provider Cirium. Delta and its regional affiliates accounted for nearly two-thirds of all cancellations worldwide on Monday, including nearly all in the United States.
United Airlines was the next worst performer since the crisis began, canceling nearly 1,500 flights. However, United canceled 17 early Monday flights.
Some flights that were grounded in the first round of flights also returned to normal operations on Monday. That included American Airlines, Spirit Airlines, Frontier Airlines and Allegiant Air.
Bastian, the CEO of Delta, said in a message to customers Sunday that the airline is continuing to restore operations that were damaged. One of Delta’s employee tracking systems was affected and could not handle the high number of changes caused by the outage.
Bastian wrote: “The technical issue occurred on the busiest travel weekend of the summer, and our loads are set at over 90%, reducing our ability to reseat. Loads are a percentage of seats. sold on each flight.
Airlines have large technological systems, and employee tracking programs are often among the oldest systems. When the operation began on Friday, it also affected the procedures used to check passengers and make pre-flight calculations about the plane’s weight and balance, the airlines reported. United and American reported temporary problems communicating with crews on the air, contributing to their decisions to ground all flights in short order.
Some airlines, including Southwest and Alaska, do not use CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity software provider whose flawed update to Microsoft Windows caused the outage. Those carriers saw fewer cancellations.
Delta, however, said that “more than half” of its IT systems are Windows-based. The airline said the outage forced IT staff to repair and restart every affected system and coordinate applications to start working together.
Bastian told staff on Monday, “It’s going to take a few more days before we’re in a position to say that … it’s going to be much better again.”
In the same video, Delta’s Chief Information Officer, Rahul Samant, said two applications were extremely difficult to restart on Friday: One that controls traffic at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport , Delta’s main hub, and one that assigns pilots and flight attendants to aircraft.
Experts had found that the scheduling program was working, “but we have work to do,” and new issues were emerging, Samant said.
Atlanta-based Delta says it offers waivers to make it easier for customers to reschedule trips.
That was little help to Jason Helmes, a fitness trainer who was trying to return home to Detroit from Denver. His flight on Sunday was delayed three times before it was cancelled; by the time the plane finally pushed back from the gate, the pilots were at the end of their legal duty.
“Everybody was desperate. No information about hotels. There is no clue as to what to do next,” Helmes said. “They said, ‘Go down to the cloakroom, your luggage will be there.’ There were thousands of bags down there. I found my luggage – lucky me. “
Helmes said Delta offered to book him again on Wednesday, but he’s worried the flight will be canceled as well. He booked his Tuesday flight home on Frontier Airlines – one of the recovered carriers. He keeps his receipts, including the hotel room, in hopes that Delta will reimburse him.
“For the last 10 years, I’ve only been on Delta,” he said. “This makes me think twice about that.”
Delta’s collapse is reminiscent of the December 2022 crisis that prompted Southwest Airlines to cancel nearly 17,000 flights over a 15-day period. Following a federal investigation into consumer protection compliance, the airline agreed to pay a $35 million settlement as part of a $140 million settlement with the Department of Transportation.
Southwest’s division began during the winter storm, but the airline’s recovery took an unusually long time due to problems with the crew’s scheduling system — an uncanny parallel to its own negligence. now they are in Delta.
The airline industry may be the most visible victim of the worldwide technology crisis caused by a faulty software update from Texas firm CrowdStrike. Microsoft says the glitch affected 8.5 million machines. CrowdStrike says it has installed a fix, but experts say it could take days or weeks to fix every affected computer.
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