A key computer program Delta uses to manage its flight crews was seriously affected by the computer outages, the airline said, and it struggled to recover even as other airlines quickly got back to normal over the weekend. The airline canceled 460 flights Tuesday. They came on top of almost 1,200 Monday — about a third of its schedule. The string of bad days are the carrier’s worst since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.
Local news reports in Atlanta showed unclaimed bags piled up at the airport and crowds of people trying to get help. Some passengers complained about trouble getting Delta to provide refunds for canceled trips. The airline temporarily barred minors from traveling alone as it canceled flights, stranding an undisclosed number of young people while apologizing “for any confusion and frustration” for families.
And while passengers stewed, airline crews also struggled to communicate with their managers.
Delta said that it would cooperate with the Transportation Department investigation and was focused on its recovery, which appeared to be gathering momentum Tuesday.
“Across our operation, Delta teams are working tirelessly to care for and make it right for customers impacted by delays and cancellations as we work to restore the reliable, on-time service they have come to expect from Delta,” the airline said in a statement.
The wave of cancellations was a blow for an airline with a strong reputation for customer service that had managed to avoid the kinds of meltdowns that have embarrassed its leading competitors in recent years.
William McGee, a senior fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project and a longtime advocate for passenger rights, said he was surprised that it was Delta that stumbled, given its track record for reliability. But the carrier’s troubles are only the latest example of the lack of resiliency in an aviation system stretched thin.
“We’ve seen this movie over and over again,” McGee said.
It wasn’t immediately clear why Delta had fared so much worse than its competitors in the wake of the computer outages. But the situation at Delta mirrors a meltdown at Southwest during Christmas 2022, which began with severe weather but snowballed once the airline’s scheduling system faltered. That also sparked a federal investigation and prompted Congress to tighten laws governing passengers rights.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a statement Tuesday that Delta had to take care of its passengers.
“This is not just the right thing to do, it’s the law, and our department will leverage the full extent of our investigative and enforcement power to ensure the rights of Delta’s passengers are upheld,” Buttigieg said on X.
The department’s actions are in line with the aggressive posture the Biden administration has taken to ensure airlines are meeting their obligations to customers, amid record number of consumer complaints. Regulators launched a similar probe of Southwest after its December 2022 meltdown and fined the carrier $140 million for its handling of the crisis.
The problems at Delta also drew scrutiny Tuesday from lawmakers who oversee aviation. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), chair of the Commerce Committee, wrote to Bastian saying Delta appeared not to be providing customers the proper information about their rights to a refund.
“While the technology outage was clearly not caused by Delta or any airline, I am nevertheless concerned that Delta is failing to meet the moment and adequately protect the needs of passengers,” Cantwell wrote.
Delta’s problems struck at the start of what chief executive Ed Bastian told employees in a video Monday was the busiest summer travel weekend in the airline’s history.
“There could not have been a worse time for this to happen,” Bastian said, according to a transcript provided by Delta.
A defective update for CrowdStrike security software Friday knocked out computer systems worldwide causing flight delays across the globe. Though several major carriers were able to recover relatively quickly, Delta continued to struggle throughout the weekend and into this week.
Rahul Samant, the airline’s IT chief, told employees that 60 percent of the airline’s systems run on Windows, the system affected by the outage. All of those systems went down and had to be manually reset, Samant said, according to the transcript.
That work was completed in the space of several hours, but Samant said it took several more hours for data to flow smoothly. The crew-tracking system came back online at 11 a.m. but had a huge backlog of data that kept changing as the airline’s operation continued to struggle, according to Samant. IT teams tried to give it more power.
“Everything except that critical system is up and running,” Samant said. “But it is a critical system, and we’re working on, how do we re-sync, how do we reset?”
Pilots and flight attendants found themselves unable to get through to schedulers.
Darren Hartmann, the chairman of the Delta pilots union, said in an update for members Tuesday that many pilots had been stranded along with passengers. Hartmann said pilots faced “the inability to contact the company in any capacity and the feeling that we have been abandoned in the system.”
Hartmann said that while the scale of the problems was a surprise, they reflected long-standing concerns the union had about Delta’s systems for communicating with crews.
“We share in the customers’ frustration,” Hartmann said in an interview.
For Delta passengers, the cancellations have led to long delays and severe disruptions to their travel plans. Some scrambled to come up with alternative ways to complete their journeys.
Late Monday night, Seattle-Tacoma International Airport felt as packed and frenetic as the last day of a peak holiday period. On Concourse A, disgruntled and worn-down crowds congregated around Delta’s gates and formed blockades in the main corridor. Several passengers dragged chairs from other seating areas and placed them in the queue.
Sydney Miller, 33, was on her way back from a vacation in Europe with a friend. Her plan was to travel from London to Atlanta, and then home to St. Louis via Miami. But her initial flight Monday was delayed for four hours, causing her to miss the connections and get stuck in Atlanta.
Delta rebooked her, but the new flight wouldn’t leave until late Tuesday night — “in theory,” Miller said. She needed to get back home to work, so she decided to book her own flight on a different airline and decline the Delta rebooking.
Miller eventually got a room at a crowded Motel 6 at 3 a.m. — accommodations she said she got only after insisting Delta help her. In the meantime, she had tried to contact Delta customer service to exercise her right for a refund for the canceled flights, but rather than help her, Miller said, the agents and customer service representatives told her she couldn’t decline the rebooked flight and sent her on a “goose chase.”
“It’s been very frustrating to be told over and over that we can’t get a refund or someone can’t do this for us, that someone else has to do it, and then we call that someone else, and they tell us to call someone else,” she said.
Cole Lyle, 34, spent a day and a half in the Atlanta airport on the way home to Alexandria, Va., after a vacation in Montana.
He arrived in Atlanta early Sunday to find customer service lines stretching around corners. Every terminal and even the Delta lounge was jam-packed, he said, sharing footage of the airport on social media. His return flight to D.C. was repeatedly delayed until Delta finally canceled it in the middle of the night, Lyle said, leaving him to spend the night in the airport.
“Honestly it was a little heartbreaking. … I saw young mothers with babies sitting in the airport overnight,” Lyle said.
He said he spent another full day in the airport trying to get a flight back to D.C. but found the Delta app glitching, and agents were hard to reach. He tried to book a train, but the Amtrack station was packed, too. Finally, on Tuesday morning, he was able to book a one-way rental car, and began the nine-hour trip home.
Ayo Sekai says she arrived in Atlanta around 11:30 p.m. Sunday. Her connected flight to Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport was delayed, moved to a different concourse, moved back, and then finally canceled around 4 in the morning.
“That’s when all hell broke loose,” Sekai said. “People were yelling at each other and getting upset.”
Sekai said Delta’s representatives refused to answer questions, instead directing people to a customer service line that appeared to have 200 people waiting. Tensions ran so high that someone called the police seeking clarity on the situation, Sekai said.
The next day she returned to D.C. on a flight with Southwest, spending about $500 on a one-way ticket. “They were totally ragging on Delta, saying, ‘We would never do that to you. We’re your friends, we’ll get you home,’” Sekai recalls.
Buttigieg spoke to Bastian on Sunday, reminding him of the airline’s commitments to its passengers and the Transportation Department’s authority to hold it accountable, according to Buttigieg’s office.
“You do not need to remind me, I know,” Bastian said he replied, “because we do our very best, particularly in tough times, taking care of our customers.”
Andrea Sachs contributed to this report.
