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Delta Airlines stood out as the airline worst affected by the major CrowdStrike meltdown on Friday, with the Atlanta-based carrier canceling over 3,500 flights over the weekend and the chaos bleeding into the new week.
Four days after the IT outage that caused thousands of flight cancellations worldwide, Delta is still struggling to return to normal, with 600 flights canceled on Monday, or about 16% of its domestic schedule.
The issues for Delta continued after Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg singled out the airline on Sunday, according to the flight-tracking website FlightAware.
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Delta has been the slowest to restore its operations. Monday's cancellations added to the 1,300 flights canceled on Sunday, roughly the same number as each of the previous two days and delayed another 1,600 over the weekend.
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In comparison, American Airlines and United Airlines had about 50 combined cancellations as of Monday, as their operations recovered from the blackout.
In a public statement to customers on Sunday, Delta CEO Ed Bastian apologized for the disruptions and attributed the problem to the computer program affecting its "crew tracking" software, which was unable to process the unprecedented number of changes triggered by the system outage.
"Canceling a flight is always our last resort and something we don't take lightly," he said.
Bastian explained that the outage occurred during the busiest travel weekend of the summer, with capacity on its flights already exceeding 90%. That severely limited the airline's ability to re-accommodate passengers.
In a statement to Newsweek, a spokesperson for Delta confirmed that the original issue had to do with the CrowdStrike outage.
"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.
'US airlines don't always invest in IT'
The problems at Delta are similar to the ones Southwest Airlines faced over the end-of-year holiday travel period in 2022 when it had to cancel nearly 17,000 flights over the course of more than a week due to a problem with its crew scheduling system.
"US airlines outsource heavily, and as Southwest's 2022 meltdown showed, they don't always invest in IT," said William J. McGee, senior fellow for aviation and travel at the American Economic Liberties Project. "What this shows is the vulnerability of that 'all the eggs in one basket' type of thing," he added.
Lina Khan, commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission, said that such vulnerabilities are prevalent across various industries, where a single point of failure can cascade into a system-wide outage, impacting millions.
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"All too often these days, a single glitch results in a system-wide outage, affecting industries from healthcare and airlines to banks and auto dealers. Millions of people and businesses pay the price. These incidents reveal how concentration can create fragile systems," Khan said after Friday's outage.
Delta passengers have expressed frustration over the ongoing disruptions. Despite efforts to manage the crisis, the recovery process has been slow. Delta is offering travel waivers for flights booked from July 19-21.
But the high volume of affected passengers has overwhelmed Delta's customer service platforms, leading to intermittent performance challenges and scrutiny from government officials.
"I have made clear to Delta that we expect the airline to provide prompt refunds to consumers who choose not to be rebooked, 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," Buttigieg said on Sunday.
The CrowdStrike glitch, one of the worst IT failures in history, affected 8.5 million computers worldwide. The cybersecurity firm reported that a software update affected Microsoft's Windows operating system, which many airlines use for reservations, flight scheduling and other critical functions.
Update 7/22/24 4:00 p.m. ET: This story has been updated with comment from Delta.
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