Delta canceling more than 300 flights today
ASSOICATED PRESS
Delta Air Lines passengers stood in line after flights resumed Monday, in Salt Lake City, following a computer outage. Delta Air Lines delayed or canceled hundreds of flights Monday after its computer systems crashed, stranding thousands of people on a busy travel day.
DALLAS » Travelers on Delta Air Lines endured hundreds more canceled and delayed flights today as the carrier slogged through day two of its recovery from a global computer outage.
By late morning, nearly 400 Delta flights had been scrubbed and more than 700 delayed, according to tracking service FlightStats Inc.
The disruptions followed about 1,000 cancelations and 2,800 delayed flights on Monday after a power outage at Delta’s Atlanta headquarters tripped a meltdown of its booking, communications and other systems.
The airline was back online after a few hours Monday, but the outages were so widespread that it was still dealing with the ripple effects a day later.
More than 1,000 people spent the night at Narita Airport outside Tokyo because of the shutdown. While flights resumed in the morning, Delta spokeswoman Hiroko Okada said more delays were expected.
Delta also extended a travel-waiver policy to help stranded passengers rearrange their travel plans.
The airline posted a video apology by CEO Ed Bastian. And it offered refunds and $200 in travel vouchers to people whose flights were canceled or delayed at least three hours.
Delta’s challenge today will be to find enough seats on planes during the busy summer vacation season to accommodate the tens of thousands of passengers whose flights were scrubbed.
Airlines have been putting more people in each plane, so when a system of a major carrier crashes, as has happened with others before Delta, finding a new seat for the waylaid becomes more difficult.
Last month, the average Delta flight was 87 percent full.
Confusion among passengers Monday was compounded as Delta’s flight-status updates crashed as well. Instead of staying home or poolside at a hotel until the airline could fix the mess, many passengers learned about the gridlock only after they reached the airport.
They were stuck.
“By the time I showed up at the gate the employees were already disgruntled, and it was really difficult to get anybody to speak to me or get any information,” said Ashley Roache, whose flight from Lexington, Kentucky, to New York’s LaGuardia Airport was delayed. “The company could have done a better job of explaining … what was happening.”
Delta spokesman Trebor Banstetter said that after the power outage, key systems and network equipment did not switch over to backups. The investigation of the outage is ongoing, but Banstetter said that there is no indication that the problems were caused by a hack or intentional breach of the system.
Georgia Power, which controls the system where the outage began, said it appears that a failure of Delta equipment caused the airline’s power disruption. No other customers lost power, a spokesman said.
Airlines depend on huge, overlapping and complicated systems to operate flights, ticketing, boarding, airport kiosks, websites and mobile phone apps. Even brief outages can now snarl traffic and, as the Delta incident shows, those problems can go global in seconds.
Last month, Southwest Airlines canceled more than 2,000 flights over four days after an outage that it blamed on a faulty network router. United Airlines and American Airlines both suffered outages last year — United has struggled with several meltdowns since combining technology systems with merger partner Continental Airlines.
Some passengers said they were shocked that computer glitches could cause such turmoil. Others took it in stride.
Ryan Shannon, another passenger on the Lexington-to-New York flight, said passengers boarded, were asked to exit, waited about 90 minutes and then got back on the plane.
Once Delta cleared flights to take off, “we boarded and didn’t have any problems. There is always a delay, or weather, or something. I travel weekly, so I’m used to it,” Shannon said.
AP radio correspondent Julie Walker in New York, Bree Fowler in Las Vegas, Joseph Pisani in New York and Jeff Martin in Atlanta contributed to this report.
10 responses to “Delta canceling more than 300 flights today”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
I’m staying home !!
Does Kirk Caldwell have a “part time” job as CEO of Delta, too?
Delta’s woes are peanuts compared to the $14 billion dollar rail boondoggle. If Delta had $14 billion of tax dollars to pi$$ away they could have had a large fleet of brand new 777 airplanes. Kirk on the other hand, will only get us 2 rail cars capable of transporting about 200 passengers for the same price!
$14 billion rail boondoggle? Really?
While rail is 300% over budget (2004: Newly elected mayor Hannemann asserts that 34 miles of rail will cost $2.7 Billion.) it is not as bad as your post.
At least try to get it right. Rookie posters……………
http://www.newgeography.com/content/005156-live-honolulu-hart-rail-a-megaproject-failure-making
Reading isn’t your strong point is it? Maybe you should go back to watching news on TV where they spoon feed you the news. The cost for the rail project is about $14 billion not counting cost overruns and the mystery power utility to power the entire rail project.
Maybe you suffer from amnesia since I fail to comprehend why you would now contradict your own estimates and call me a rookie. Let me refresh some of your memory with the following facts YOU posted in the comments section of this article: http://www.staradvertiser.com/hawaii-news/rail-cost-could-be-nearly-3-billion-above-current-estimates/
You clearly stated the following:
1. “Rail is now at 400% over the initial estimate with no end in sight.”
and also the following…
2. “Exactly. I was always saying rail’s final cost would be $10-15 billion and now we have been proven correct.”
Old computers? Outdated incompatible software? I suggest all airlines find and hire an outside computer company that will provide the newest supercomputers along with their program writers. Get rid of their computers and let someone else do the dedicated work of figuring out computer problems, repairs, management,updating software, maintaining the daily labor of anti-virus protection, keeping room air conditioned at very low temperatures, having a backup plan for power outages, solar energy sources batteries, qualified employees, and a backup communications system that informs ALL employees what the heck is going on so they can better inform passengers. . Let the airlines concentrate on flying airplanes and passengers. The computer companies will concentrate on keeping the delicate computers running smoothly. Division of labor will add costs but much less headaches to deal with. Like our highways, shopping centers, crime spree, homelessness, there are too many people on this earth and everything is getting too overloaded. Yes, finish the rail and get ready to build more above and underground. Or sneak birth control drugs into the water supply.
Hahahahaha, can’t speak for Delta since I don’t know their situation but what you just stated is EXACTLY what corporate America has been doing lately. They’ve been firing good American software engineering teams and replacing them with cheap H1-B foreigners and IT software firms like Tata, Infosys, etc. Many of these guys just got off the boat and couldn’t code an application to save their lives with their paper-mill computer science degrees that are cheaper to acquire than a family pack of toilet paper!
Just look at what Disney did to give you a better perspective of what’s going on behind the scenes: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff-at-disney-train-foreign-replacements.html?_r=0
Power outage? Hmm…most (all) large companies have a disaster recovery site that mirrors the main site. I would be surprised and concerned if Delta don’t have one.
Delta has some explaining to do. As in telling the truth. Very hard for airlines who have a policy to always string stranded flyers along with frequent, temporary delays versus actually being up front and honest.
Evening news had a report from the power company serving this area. They said not one other company or resident in and around where Delta is experienced any power loss at all. Company’s computers showed the power grid was up and running at 100%.
Sad to say Delta’s loser CEO Ed Bastian is acting just like our utterly incompetent elected bureaucrats. Never, ever, tells the truth. Watch their nose grow long and longer………
Herded like cattle, packed in like sardines, hurry up and wait; why bother?