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Flying Delta this week? Prepare for chaos as airline struggles to recover from IT outage

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4 months ago

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Flying Delta this week? Prepare for chaos as airline struggles to recover from IT outage

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  • Delta Air Lines canceled nearly 4,500 flights between Friday and Sunday.
  • The airline says problems with its crew scheduling software is largely to blame.
  • Delta is required to honor its customer commitments, which include rebooking passengers whose flights are canceled or significantly delayed on other services at no additional cost.

It’s been a bad few days for Delta Air Lines passengers.

Though much of the global aviation industry was disrupted by Friday’s CrowdStrike outage, Delta seems to be having a uniquely difficult time recovering. According to the airline, the impact on its crew scheduling software is largely to blame.

Delta and its wholly-owned regional subsidiary Endeavor Air together canceled nearly 4,500 flights between Friday and Sunday, and as of Monday morning were already posting more than 1,000 additional delays and cancellations, according to flight tracker FlightAware.

Kristi Gatto, a traveler who went to school with the reporter on this story, was one of those affected.

Airlines rely on complex systems: Why the CrowdStrike hiccup could cause days of chaos

“I get it. Things happen. This was probably the worst flying experience that I’ve had,” Gatto said.

Her Saturday flight from Seattle to New York was canceled after Delta said it was unable to fully staff the flight, and ultimately, Gatto paid for another ticket to fly home from Vancouver on JetBlue instead.

Though Delta said it’s working on recovering operations, it’s little comfort to passengers like Gatto, now separated from their luggage and out thousands of dollars in contingency expenses.

What’s happening at Delta?

Delta Air Lines’ CEO Ed Bastian said in a statement that the carrier’s ongoing headaches are largely caused by struggles with its crew scheduling system.

“Upward of half of Delta’s IT systems worldwide are Windows based. The CrowdStrike error required Delta’s IT teams to manually repair and reboot each of the affected systems, with additional time then needed for applications to synchronize and start communicating with each other,” the statement said. “Delta’s crews are fully staffed and ready to serve our customers, but one of Delta’s most critical systems – which ensures all flights have a full crew in the right place at the right time – is deeply complex and is requiring the most time and manual support to synchronize.”

Delta’s disruptions are reminiscent of Southwest Airlines’ meltdown in December 2022, when winter storms threw a wrench in the carrier’s crew scheduling system, leading to almost 10 days of travel chaos and nearly 17,000 canceled flights. United Airlines had similar disruptions last summer when Federal Aviation Administration issues and United’s own staffing squeeze led to thousands of canceled flights. 

“There is no excuse for Delta to have had this problem because they had a huge data center problem in 2017 when they lost power. They have had some other technology problems in the interim,” Henry Harteveldt, president of Atmosphere Research, a travel industry analytics firm, told USA TODAY. “More importantly, in the past three years, they have seen American, Southwest and United get bogged down by their own technology problems.” 

United Airlines also took a hit from knock-on effects of the CrowdStrike outage, but its operations were largely recovered by Monday.

What are Delta passengers entitled to?

According to the Department of Transportation, which classifies Friday’s IT failures as “controllable” disruptions on the part of the airline, Delta is required to honor its customer commitments. Those include rebooking passengers whose flights are canceled or significantly delayed on other services at no additional cost, as well as providing hotels and meals and ground transportation vouchers for eligible travelers.

The DOT says it has received hundreds of complaints from Delta customers who did not receive those accommodations and is investigating those claims.

“I have made clear to Delta that we expect the airline to provide prompt refunds to consumers who choose not to be rebooked, and free rebooking and timely reimbursements for food and overnight hotel stays to consumers affected by the delays and cancellations, as well as adequate customer service assistance to all of their passengers,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a statement. “No one should be stranded at an airport overnight or stuck on hold for hours waiting to talk to a customer service agent. I will ensure that our department supports Delta passengers by enforcing all applicable passenger protections.”

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Delta said it would reimburse customers for hotel, meal and ground transportation expenses paid out of pocket as a result of the disruptions, but not for “prepaid” costs like hotel reservations at the customer’s destination, vacation experiences, lost wages, concerts or other tickets.

Travelers like Gatto, who book their own alternative flights, will be entitled to refunds for their original Delta tickets but may not be able to claim reimbursement for the new flights. Delta does commit to booking travelers on other airlines in the event of these kinds of disruptions under its customer commitments, but they may not have the same access to all available seats or departures from every airport that a self-booking traveler would. 

Gatto said she still plans to fight for as much compensation as she can get.

“I plan to really lay into them and let my inner New Yorker come out,” she said. “I’m going to try to get them to pay for everything.”

Where does Delta go from here? 

Delta will likely continue to be all hands on deck this week to restore reliability in its operation. But once that immediate hurdle is cleared, experts say, the company will have to do some serious reflection – and make some major investments – as a next step.

“It’s a competitive landscape out there for software, for this exact purpose. Maybe they’ll have to take a look at doing a transition,” Jon Haass, a professor of cyber intelligence and security at Arizona’s Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Prescott, told USA TODAY. “This might be the impetus, that might be the good news, the sliver lining that kicks the airlines into saying we have to treat this as a modern problem, let’s use modern tools to resolve it and not be beholden to the old, old tools that become more complicated with every new regulation that comes out.” 

Airlines often rely on older technology than many other industries, in part because their sprawling operations make upgrades cumbersome and also because strict regulations can make it difficult to get new systems approved.

Haass said airlines’ tight profit margins mean shareholders often don’t want to see large expenditures made on back-end systems, but this could force their directors and executives to do it anyway.

“As a business, they’re caught in a bind, but that’s why leadership has to have the nerve to say to its shareholders and say to its people: folks, here’s what we’re doing. Follow the flag,” he said. “We’ll see whether their CEO is a leader.” 

The fallout from this week is also likely to tarnish Delta’s premium brand image. 

“Clearly, the CrowdStrike Microsoft problem was an extraordinary unanticipated disaster, and it’s not like Delta had an obligation to think what would happen if we lost all of our Microsoft-based computers, but what Delta should have been doing is looking at all of its software,” Harteveldt said. “For an airline that holds itself out as being premium, it’s embarrassing to see it take so long to recover, especially when peer airlines like American and United have been able to do a better job of recovery.” 

He added that the next few days will be “make or break” for the airline.

“My hope is that we start to see meaningful progress from Delta within the next 48 hours. If we don’t see Delta reduce the number of canceled flights by at least half in the next 24-48 hours, there’s a much bigger problem brewing in Atlanta than we realized,” Harteveldt said. 

Zach Wichter is a travel reporter for USA TODAY based in New York. You can reach him at zwichter@usatoday.com.

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