Delta Air Lines says some computer systems are still working slowly more than a day after an outage crippled the airline and led to more than 1,500 cancelled flights.
Advertisement
Those numbers could grow because Delta has “to reset the operation and get crews, aircraft and other elements of the operation back in place”, the company said in a statement on its website late Monday.
Delta ranks as the third-largest in the world by number of passengers carried, with 138.8 million travelers previous year, according to industry group IATA.
Delta says that you are entitled to a refund or a one-time change to your ticket without a fee if your flight is cancelled or significantly delayed.
“While inquiries are high and wait times are long, our customer service agents are doing everything they can to assist”, the company said in a statement. “But when this happened, critical systems and network equipment didn’t switch over to backups”.
Last year, United Airlines had a computer glitch that affected almost 5,000 flights. While flights resumed in the morning, Delta spokeswoman Hiroko Okada said more delays were expected. He said the airline’s investigation into the cause of the outage was continuing but said there were no indications of hacking.
A spokesman for Georgia Power said that the company believes a failure of Delta equipment caused the airline’s power outage.
“Delta is a vast people-moving machine that is tightly wound around a schedule that meets customer demand”, West said.
According to industry group IATA, Delta ranks only behind American Airlines and Southwest Airlines.
Delta passengers endured hundreds more canceled and delayed flights as the carrier slogged through day two of its recovery from the meltdown. Even brief outages can now snarl traffic and, as the Delta incident shows, those problems can go global in seconds.
United Airlines had similar problems past year.
At Dayton International Airport, there are long lines for travelers flying Delta. Others took it in stride. First word of the problem came from Delta’s Twitter account. “I travel weekly, so I’m used to it”.
Advertisement
“So we encourage anyone who’s planning to fly out from Detroit Metro on a Delta flight to call ahead, or log on to Delta.com or use their fly delta app to check the status of their flight”, Donerson says. Travelers on some routes can also make a one-time change to the ticket without paying Delta’s usual change fee of $200 for domestic flights and up to $500 for worldwide flights.
