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A System Outage Stranded Tens of Thousands of Air Travelers

Flights now in the air are reportedly operating normally and weren’t affected by the outage.

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The latest update on Delta’s website had these details: “Due to a Delta system wide outage travel has been impacted to/from/through all Delta Air Lines served cities”.

“Customers heading to the airport should expect delays and cancellations”, Delta warned in a statement.

-July 8 – United Continental grounded all of its flights worldwide for two hours, citing issues with a router.

A power outage at an Atlanta facility at around 2:30 a.m. local time initiated a cascading meltdown, according to the airline, which is also based in Atlanta.

Many Delta customers are just waking up to this news or finding out at the airport. All flight status systems, including airport screens were showing incorrect flight times. There may also be some lag time in the display of accurate flight status at delta.com, the Fly Delta App and from Delta representatives on the phone and in airport.

Delta issued an apology to customers and said teams were attempting to fix the problem as quickly as possible.

The company said its IT systems were down everywhere and “hopefully it won’t be much longer”.

Typical responses to Delta’s customers complaining about their service were: “We are experiencing a system outage nationwide” and “Delta has experienced a computer outage that has affected flights scheduled for this morning”.

Pearson International Airport in Toronto and the Montreal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport were among many that were affected.

Delta had the fewest cancellations in May at 39, which counted as a statistical zero, according to the most recent flight statistics from the Transportation Department. “Counter agent says she doesn’t know flight status”, one would-be traveler tweeted.

The airlines said it has activated its travel waiver program that allows passengers with cancelled or significantly delayed flights to receive a refund or make a ticket change without a fee.

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A spokesman for Georgia Power told The Associated Press that the company believes a failure of Delta equipment caused the airline’s power outage. Southwest Airlines was forced to cancel more than 2,000 flights across the US last month after technology problems prevented many travelers from checking in or boarding flights.

Delta computer outage grounds flights worldwide, travel waiver issued