Though the company got its computer systems running a few hours after what the airline said was a massive power outage at its Atlanta headquarters on Monday, the disruption spilled over into Tuesday, with the airline canceling more than 300 flights so far this morning.
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Making things worse for some passengers Tuesday morning, Delta’s flight-status updates weren’t working, as the Associated Press reports. No other customers lost power, he said. “I travel weekly, so I’m used to it”.
A spokesman for the local electric company, Georgia Power, said the problem started with a piece of Delta equipment called a switchgear, which direct flows within a power system.
WGCL-TV, the CBS affiliate in Atlanta, reported the problem was first uncovered when a flight was to take off from San Francisco. In June, Delta Air Lines had the most passengers at RDU, accounting for more than 29 percent of all traffic. Southwest Airlines was forced to cancel more than 2,000 flights across the USA last month after technology problems prevented many travelers from checking in or boarding flights.
Flights that were already in the air when the outage occurred continued to their destinations, but flights on the ground remained there.
Airlines depend on huge, overlapping and complicated systems to operate flights, ticketing, boarding, airport kiosks, websites and mobile phone apps.
That has afflicted airlines in the USA and overseas.
United Airlines stranded thousands of passengers after a failed attempt to merge its technology systems with Continental Airlines’s during their 2010 merger. In Tokyo, a dot-matrix printer was resurrected to keep track of passengers on a flight to Shanghai.
Currently, the airline is in recovery mode as they work to get their system back up to full speed.
Some passengers said they were shocked that computer glitches could cause such turmoil.
“It does feel like the old days”, Kopsick said. Others took it in stride. Instead of staying home or poolside at a hotel until the troubles blew over, many passengers only learned about the quagmire only after they passed through airport security. The impacted travel dates are between 8 Aug 8 and 9 Aug. Rebookings and reschedulings are available for customers until 12 Aug. Delta is offering a $200 (roughly Rs 13,381) refund for anyone who experienced a delay of greater than three hours or a cancelled flight.
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Shares of Delta were little changed at $37.40 in afternoon trading.
