Delta’s Total Collapse: Hundreds Of Thousands Stranded, Unable To Even Talk To The Airline, While Others Recover
by Gary Leff
Delta Air Lines continues to perform poorly on Sunday, with more cancellations than any other airline in the world, stemming from poor recovery efforts from the CrowdStrike outage. In percentage terms, about the only airline faring worse than Delta is Endeavor Air which is owned by Delta, although United also still struggles.
Delta cancelled nearly 1,200 flights or over a third of its operation on Saturday, and nearly half of its flights were delayed. (Endeavor Air cancelled 44% of flights.) Spirit also struggled, while American cancelled 1% of flights and Southwest cancelled just… one.
American crowed deservingly about its ability to recover from the CrowdStrike outage, noting that it had passed before Saturday for the airline. Pushing back on my suggestion that American Airlines benefited from luck being early to have CrowdStrike turn the relevant servers supporting hem off and on, a spokesperson argued,
We devised some creative solutions early on at the IOC and worked closely with the FAA to find workarounds to get our flights dispatched. Wd also had some experts onsite there within 30 minutes of the issues popping up. So probably a bit more than luck!
Delta Air Lines, whose operation usually outperforms peers, seems to also have a harder time recovering from meltdowns. As Joe Brancatelli put it in his excellent ($) newsletter,
What is Delta’s particular problem? Hard to say, but its crews and aircraft are largely out of position and the airline has had a difficult time resetting. It has sent out an all-hands-on-deck plea to pilots and flight attendants asking them to pick up extra segments in hopes of getting back to something like a normal operation.
None of this should surprise you, of course. Despite management’s huffy insistence that Delta is a “premium” operation that runs better than other airlines, the facts show that Delta’s service-recovery processes historically are atrocious. It’s an ongoing issue whenever a glitch–whether internal or external–occurs. Delta seems to have massive difficulty getting back to whatever passes for “normal” in these times.
In practice this means long lines at airports and an inability to even reach customer service.
7/20/2024 10:30 AM Travel Warning
Due to the global IT outage by @CrowdStrike on 7/19, my flight with @Delta at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport has been canceled twice (7/19 and 7/20). The airport is a ZOO, long lines at the lost baggage & customer service. pic.twitter.com/oGSolX74j5
— Ethan M. Cortazzo (@Ethan_Cortazzo1) July 20, 2024
Delta crews have just as hard a time as customers, and have been stranded around the world. The airline lacked reserve crews to staff planes in order to recover. Saturday for Delta was even worse than Friday.
Passengers report being told they would have to wait 17 hours to message with an agent in the airline’s app:
When these things happen our focus is usually on the passengers, but let’s not forget how hard it is for the frontline employees who generally don’t get any extra rewards for pressing through it.
I just witnessed a kind @Delta gate employee break down in tears. And frankly I totally get it. People wrongly take out their frustrations on them. I hope Delta plans on giving all the employees who are going through immense stress a really nice bonus. They deserve it
The airline was silent from 10 a.m. Saturday forward, saying only before that they were ‘continuing their recovery.’
Delta is a good airline that is not doing very well right now. But it’s also an overrated airline, a result of its own PR machine that persistently beats the drum about how premium it is despite workhorse Boeing 767s whose premium passenger experience lags that of both American and United. This is a strong reminder that though it performs marginally better much of the time, and its crews are marginally friendlier, it’s still an airline and can underperform peers in dramatic ways.
When Delta Air Lines had an operational meltdown after the CrowdStrike technology outage last month, thousands of the carrier's employees at reservations centers and airports around the country were left trying to assist passengers stranded after flight cancellations.
Why did it take days for Delta to resume normal service? The reason for the prolonged recovery from the outage was because the CrowdStrike update disruption required a manual fix at each individual computer system, experts told ABC News.
He said the Atlanta-based carrier is now back up and running and over the last seven days has had less than 100 cancellations in aggregate over 30,000 flights. Still, Delta has been left to recover from both a massive financial and reputational hit.
While many airlines large and small had the CrowdStrike problem affect computers that were supposed to check in passengers, it appeared that Delta might have been the one airline that had its crucial crew scheduling software affected.
Bastian wrote that Delta has “a significant number of applications that use (the Microsoft Windows operating) system, and in particular one of our crew tracking-related tools was affected and unable to effectively process the unprecedented number of changes triggered by the system shutdown.”
March 10, 1948: Delta Air Lines Flight 705, a Douglas DC-4, crashed near Chicago Municipal (Midway) Airport shortly after takeoff while en route to Miami killing 12 of 13 on board. Officials determined that longitudinal control of the airplane was lost resulting in the crash.
Delta, meanwhile, captured unwanted national headlines as network restoration dragged on over five miserable days in which the carrier canceled approximately 7,000 mainline and regional flights. It said those cancellations disrupted the travel of 1.3 million customers and cost the carrier approximately $500 million.
Some airlines, including Southwest and Alaska, do not use CrowdStrike, the provider of cybersecurity software whose faulty upgrade to Microsoft Windows triggered the outages. Those carriers saw relatively few cancellations.
Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said Wednesday that the massive IT outage earlier this month that stranded thousands of customers will cost it $500 million. Bastian said the figure includes not just lost revenue but “the tens of millions of dollars per day in compensation and hotels” over a period of five days.
As a remote-first organization, we built our roles, processes, teams and tools to enable fully remote, asynchronous work across a distributed workforce.
The software glitch, which resulted in the dreaded Blue Screen of Death on computers around the world and across industries, struck at Delta's pilot scheduling system and rendered the most profitable US airline helpless to match crews to aircraft.
The quality of Delta's in-flight and airport experience, expanding network of destinations and reputation for reliability lifted it to the number one ranking on Conde Nast Traveler's 2022 Readers Choice Awards for Best Airlines in the U.S.
The Atlanta-based carrier has canceled more than 4,000 flights since Friday. Delta canceled 400 more flights Tuesday as its troubles in the wake of the global CrowdStrike-Microsoft IT outage dragged on for the fifth consecutive day.
In the U.S., in June 2021, after a steady decline in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations, the arrival of Delta coincided with a rapid reversal of that trend. In the fall of 2021, there were surges even in the most vaccinated states, prompting experts to urge people to get their booster shots.
The Broken Delta configuration is used to protect against earth faults. It is a configuration that works by. monitoring the vector sum of the phase voltages. Like Us. It consists of a delta connection on the secondary of a potential transformer that is open at one point as in.
The problem is the delta's wetlands were and still are built and sustained by sediment delivered by the river. Leveeing of the river cut the tie between the sediment-filled river and its delta, stopping the cycle of new wetland growth.
Introduction: My name is Tish Haag, I am a excited, delightful, curious, beautiful, agreeable, enchanting, fancy person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.
We notice you're using an ad blocker
Without advertising income, we can't keep making this site awesome for you.
