Systems were back up about six hours later but the airline has said it expects 300 flight cancellations today. 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 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.
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West is giving the airline’s most detailed description yet of what happened Monday to trigger a global outage of its computer systems.
Flights coming in and out of Appleton Monday experienced delays, but there were no cancellations. 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.
The largest USA airlines – which account for about 85 percent of domestic air traffic – are required to report on-time performance for each flight to the government each month, and to disclose that information on their websites and to travel agencies. Paul International Airport this morning, part of its broader effort to get planes and crews back in place after Monday’s power outage and computer system shutdown.
Last year, United Airlines had a computer glitch that affected almost 5,000 flights. United Airlines and American Airlines both suffered outages past year – United has struggled with several meltdowns since combining technology systems with merger partner Continental Airlines.
The CEO of Delta Air Lines has issued an apology after a computer outage that grounded all departing flights on Monday. But the local electric company, Georgia Power, said that it was not to blame and that the equipment failure was on Delta’s end. “I couldn’t get home yesterday at all”, he said. “Delta can’t just host its systems on Joe Blow’s cloud server somewhere else in the way that another business might be able to do”.
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.
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Delta officials declined to say what kind of backup procedures they have. Even brief outages can snarl traffic and cause long delays.
