The company said it’s continuing to investigate what exactly went wrong. Monday morning is usually busy as business travelers gear up and vacationers return home.
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Crowds filled the check-in area Monday morning, waiting for Delta’s computer system to come back online.
The problem started with a 2:30 a.m. power outage that wreaked havoc on computer systems at Delta’s Atlanta hub.
“Delta probably had some kind of catastrophic failure that took everything, even their backup systems offline, which left them dead”, Pearcy said.
The airline’s leaders apologized for what customers have been through and blame it on a computer problem caused by a power outage, but they add that additional delays and cancellations are expected.
Tens of thousands of affected customers struggled to figure out the status of their flights.
Following the outage, the airline grounded flights awaiting departure although those already en route operated normally.
Additionally, the company said it would provide $200 travel vouchers to all customers who experienced a delay of three hours or greater or had a cancelled flight as a result of the system-wide outage yesterday.
Delta Air Lines Inc.is the third-largest in the world by number of passengers carried, with 138.8 million travelers past year, according to industry group IATA, but it ranks just behind American Airlines and Southwest Airlines.
Airlines depend on huge, overlapping and complicated systems to operate flights, schedule crews and run ticketing, boarding, airport kiosks, websites and mobile phone apps.
Rivals Southwest Airlines Co and American Airlines Group Inc have also suffered flight disruptions earlier due to data system malfunctions. In Tokyo, a dot-matrix printer was resurrected to keep track of passengers on a flight to Shanghai.
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Ryan Shannon, another passenger on the Lexington-to-New York flight, said passengers boarded, were asked to exit, waited about 90 minutes and then got back on the plane. “I travel weekly, so I’m used to it”, Shannon said.
