Delta Air Lines canceled 311 flights on Wednesday, as the Atlanta-based carrier continued to recover from Monday’s power outage that resulted in thousands of cancelled flights and angry, inconvenienced travelers.
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The failure of Delta Air Lines Inc.’s worldwide computer network this week spotlights the vulnerability of the information systems sustaining the biggest US carriers, each of which has contended with major disruptions during the past year.
The systemic catastrophe began with a power outage in Atlanta, where the company headquarters are located, at approximately 2:30 a.m. ET (0630GMT) Monday.
While this has been an unfortunate week – and it’s been a week we’ve been very sorry about, we’ve learned a lot about – I see no continuing effect in terms of the quality and reliability of the product we’ll be putting forth in the future. “It’s like an operation room at a hospital: You can’t say I don’t have power or I don’t have a backup for the system”. In addition to the disruption this has caused to our people and our customers, that is the thing I am most disappointed about. Although the systems restarted in a few hours, the airline has struggled to clear out stranded passengers and put its national flight schedule back together. The reason we lost it was that we had a power control module that failed.
Q: You and other Delta executives have been touting the airline’s impressive record of days without cancelations. Southwest Airlines recently suffered a similar snarl, and technology outages have hit other carriers as well. But, he said, “I don’t think that was the problem”.
He said Delta spends about $1 billion a year on technology and this year hired a new chief information officer from insurance giant AIG and a new head of technology infrastructure from Marriott, who were “pulling together the next level of investment”.
“We shouldn’t talk about the cost of making your system reliable because you live on that system”, Abdelghany said. “We’ll do everything that we can to make certain this does not happen again”, Bastian said in the video. It offered refunds and $200 in travel vouchers to people whose flights were canceled or delayed at least three hours.
Bastian said that by late afternoon Wednesday, the airline was “largely back to normal”.
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Edwards did not have specific data on how numerous delays and cancellations Wednesday affected Detroit Metro Airport travelers, but he advised customers to check delta.com or the airline’s app, Fly Delta.
