Travelers on Delta Air Lines endured hundreds more canceled and delayed flights on Tuesday as the carrier slogged through day two of its recovery from a global computer outage.
Advertisement
Delta Chief Operating Officer Gil West addressed the cause of the operations systems failure.
“We were able to bring our systems back on line and resume flights within a few hours yesterday but we are still operating in recovery mode”, said Dave Holtz, senior vice president – Operations and Customer Center.
Delta said it experienced a computer outage that has impacted flights scheduled for Monday morning.
By early afternoon Tuesday, Delta had canceled 530 flights and delayed 1,200 flights Tuesday, the Associated Press reported.
Customers who have not been contacted can reach out to Customer Care here to receive a voucher.
The problem was first uncovered when a flight was to take off from San Francisco. Debbie McGarry left Switzerland on Monday and was still stuck Tuesday at the Atlanta airport, far from her Arizona home.
“Some of the men were yelling”, she said. “I thought there might be a fistfight”. About 1,000 flights were canceled altogether while around 3,000 were delayed. The ripple effect from such a large disruption can take several days to full shake out of an airline’s entire schedule, and reports coming in Tuesday suggested Delta customers still faced a ragged operation by the airline.
Delta also extended a travel-waiver policy to help stranded passengers rearrange their travel plans.
The airline has posted a video apology by CEO Ed Bastian, and has offered refunds and £150 in travel vouchers to people whose flights were cancelled or delayed by at least three hours. 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 global flights.
Airlines’ computer systems are in many cases older than the planes themselves.
Confusion among passengers Monday was compounded as Delta’s flight-status updates crashed as well.
“Delta is a vast people-moving machine that is tightly wound around a schedule that meets customer demand”, West said.
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. Even brief outages can snarl traffic and cause long delays.
