Happy Monday, travelers! It’s a great day for flying… unless you’ve got or are trying to make a Delta reservation, in which case you are, well, kind of up a creek without an airplane.
This morning around 5:00 a.m. EDT, Delta announced that a power outage that started around 2:30 was interfering with its computer systems.
At that point, any flights already in the air were operating normally but flights still awaiting departure — which, that early in the day, is most of them — were expected to be delayed. From that point, the issue has only cascaded.
Delta’s most recent update, as of 7:30 a.m., says “large-scale cancellations” are expected during the day. Want to know if that includes yours? Good luck finding out: part of the systems failure means that the website and airport screens are incorrectly showing flights as on-time, rather than cancelled.
In a tweet at about 5:20, a Delta Air Lines rep tweeted that all flights were grounded due to the outage, so it’s probably safe to assume this morning that that means yours, too. You should, of course, check with customer service but expect high volumes through all avenues, both phone and social media, and be patient if you’re stuck in an airport with hundreds of fellow wayward travelers.
Delta has already announed free changes / travel vouchers for passengers who were supposed to get somewhere today and now can’t.
However, as we saw with Southwest’s outage last month, it can take days to get all the planes and all the passengers and crew back where they’re supposed to be after a massive technical glitch. And that was “only” around 1500 flights domestically getting grounded. Delta’s outage is likely to have significant repercussions around the world for days to come.
by Kate Cox via Consumerist