A long line formed at Indianapolis International Airport as anxious Delta travelers waited to check in for their flights.
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While the airline aimed to limit customer backlash by offering free changes to bookings, social media was rife with customers complaining.
By 5 p.m., Delta officials said they had canceled more than 740 flights, although computer systems were fully functioning again.
When frustrated Delta Air Lines customers began getting in touch with the company early on Monday morning, after they faced delays in everything from checking in to taking off, the airline initially said things would be up and running shortly.
For passengers, hardship from the Monday morning meltdown was compounded by the fact that Delta’s flight-status updates weren’t working either. (Some of those listed flights may be code-share flights in which Delta tickets passengers to fly on other airlines). Delta employees had to write out boarding passes by hand, and at one airport they resurrected a dot-matrix printer from the graveyard of 1980s technology. “The company could have done a better job of explaining. what was happening”. More than 1,000 people spent the night at the Narita airport because of a computer shutdown that halted Delta Air Lines flights worldwide.
Delta CEO Ed Bastian apologized to customers Monday afternoon via a video posted to the carrier’s website. The company lost power around 2:30 a.m.at its Atlanta hub but gradually resumed it six hours later.
Delta spokesman Trebor Banstetter said there were no indications of hacking. Flights that took off before the outage started remained unaffected. Even brief data failures can snarl traffic and cause long delays.
And another tweet a little later suggested the outage could be affecting operations beyond the U.S.as well. The company said travelers will be entitled to a refund if their flight is canceled or significantly delayed.
United has suffered a series of delays since it merged with Continental as the technological systems of the two airlines clashed.
He says that because the flight crews and planes for the morning flights had arrived the night before, only minor adjustments were needed to keep the flights on track.
The problems also meant flight information was not showing correctly on Delta’s website or on airport information boards, and this could also take time to resolve, the carrier said in the latest update.
Many passengers, like Bryan Kopsick, 20, from Richmond, were shocked that computer glitches could cause such turmoil.
“This is not organized at all”, said the 51-year-old professional organizer from Pembroke Pines, Fla. “They’re instructed to check everyone in and wish us luck”. That left tens of thousands of passengers stranded – including some at the Des Moines International Airport.
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“The Delta team is working very hard to restore [services] and get the system back [operating] as quickly as possible”, he said.
