Late last week, there was a major technology outage caused by a software update gone wrong from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike. The update basically took down Microsoft systems worldwide. A lot of industries and businesses were affected, including airlines, hotels, retailers, and more. It was so widespread that there were conspiracy theories about it. Most places were able to recover and resume business as usual over the weekend. Airlines, however, were not as quick to recover. Delta, American, and United Airlines had to cancel thousands of flights. Southwest, which infamously melted down last December due to its antiquated software, was not affected.
Five days after the systemwide failures, the airlines still haven’t completely recovered. Specifically, Delta is still struggling hard. People are stuck buying more expensive tickets on other airlines or camping out in airports with little or no recourse. Enter Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, who has been on top of all of the airlines’ shenanigans over these past three years. Two years ago, he set up the Customer Service Dashboard that requires transparency and serves as a cheat sheet for customers to know each airline’s policy on certain things. Last year, he fined American Airlines $4.1 million for keeping passengers on board for too long during delays and in April, he announced that airlines are now required to give automatic refunds when a flight is delayed for more than three hours or canceled. Keeping up with that energy, the DOT is investigating Delta as a result of their catastrophic failure.
Delta Air Lines is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Office of Aviation Consumer Protection as the airline scraps hundreds of flights for a fifth straight day after a faulty software update from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike took down Microsoft systems around the world. While the outage impacted many businesses, from retailers to airlines, most have regained their footing and resumed regular operations. As of 8 a.m. Eastern on Tuesday, however, Delta had canceled 415 flights, far exceeding cancellations by any other U.S. airline, according to data from flight tracker FlightAware.
In a statement sent to CBS News on Tuesday, the Transportation Department said it “is investigating Delta Air Lines following continued widespread flight disruptions and reports of concerning customer service failures.”
Delta said in a statement it has received the agency’s notice of investigation, adding that it “is fully cooperating.”
“We remain entirely focused on restoring our operation after cybersecurity vendor CrowdStrike’s faulty Windows update rendered IT systems across the globe inoperable,” the company said.
Delta Air Lines is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Office of Aviation Consumer Protection as the airline scraps hundreds of flights for a fifth straight day after a faulty software update from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike took down Microsoft systems around the world. While the outage impacted many businesses, from retailers to airlines, most have regained their footing and resumed regular operations. As of 8 a.m. Eastern on Tuesday, however, Delta had canceled 415 flights, far exceeding cancellations by any other U.S. airline, according to data from flight tracker FlightAware. In a statement sent to CBS News on Tuesday, the Transportation Department said it “is investigating Delta Air Lines following continued widespread flight disruptions and reports of concerning customer service failures.”
Delta said in a statement it has received the agency’s notice of investigation, adding that it “is fully cooperating.”
The airline is continuing to struggle with the aftermath of the outage, causing frustrations for travelers trying to get home or go on vacation. Some have opted to pay for pricey tickets on other airlines in order to get to their destinations, according to CBS Boston.
In a Monday statement, Delta said its employees are “working 24/7” to restore its operations, but CEO Ed Bastian also said it would take “another couple days” before “the worst is clearly behind us.” Other carriers have returned to nearly normal levels of service disruptions, intensifying the glare on Delta’s relatively weaker response to the outage that hit airlines, hospitals and businesses around the world.
Delta has canceled more than 5,500 flights since the outage started early Friday morning, including more than 700 flights on Monday, according to aviation-data provider Cirium. Delta and its regional affiliates accounted for about two-thirds of all cancellations worldwide Monday, including nearly all aborted flights in the United States. United Airlines was the next-worst performer since the onset of the outage, canceling nearly 1,500 flights. United canceled 40 flights on Tuesday morning, FlightAware’s data shows.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg spoke to Delta CEO Ed Bastian on Sunday about the airline’s high number of cancellations since Friday. Buttigieg said his agency had received “hundreds of complaints” about Delta, and he expects the airline to provide hotels and meals for travelers who are delayed and to issue quick refunds to those customers who don’t want to be rebooked on a later flight.
“No one should be stranded at an airport overnight or stuck on hold for hours waiting to talk to a customer service agent,” Buttigieg said. He vowed to help Delta passengers by enforcing air travel consumer-protection rules.
Get ‘em, Secretary Pete! I saw Pete’s official government account was Tweeting all weekend, reminding people that they were entitled to refunds if they wanted them, not just the vouchers that some airlines were apparently offering without the refund option. Between all of the airline regulation, war on junk fees, and going after monopolies like Ticketmaster, the Biden administration has done so much for customers and us regular folk. It’s so awesome to know that after years of screwing us over, adding and increasing fees, and never seeming to face accountability, we’re finally seeing repeated instances of it happening.
My family and I actually flew on Southwest last Thursday morning and checked into our hotel that afternoon. We got here just in time because we heard from fellow guests the next day that three hours after our arrival, it was total chaos because the Hilton’s check-in systems went down as a part of the update, too. We’re in San Diego for Comic-Con, so our East Coast selves went to bed early and missed the entire thing, but all people could talk about the next day was how much of a clusterf-ck it was.
We have received reports of continued disruptions and unacceptable customer service conditions at Delta Air Lines, including hundreds of complaints filed with @USDOT.
I have made clear to Delta that we will hold them to all applicable passenger protections.
— Secretary Pete Buttigieg (@SecretaryPete) July 22, 2024
I am hearing reports of some airlines only offering flight credits to passengers for cancelled flights. ⁰⁰Let me be clear — you are entitled to get your money back promptly if your flight is cancelled and you don't take a rebooking.
— Secretary Pete Buttigieg (@SecretaryPete) July 20, 2024
Photos credit: CNP/INSTARimages and via Instagram/Delta
Full confidence that Mayor Pete will get this handled.. I just love that man and his adorable family.
(I stopped flying Delta 7 years ago when my ex got the airline miles in the divorce, and it’s his vacation time 🤭🤭)
I try my best not to fly Delta any more (sometimes I’m forced to by more work travel program) after I heard a conversation among flight attendants at the back of the plane one day–they were unhappy with management, with management’s compensation vs. their own, the whole ‘they don’t get paid until the plane doors close’ thing, and other stuff I can’t remember.
I’m loving Pete B & all the Biden administration has done for us consumers. I managed to get my student loans forgiven per the PSLF program–but only after lots of fighting with that previous adminstration’s people–and several of my friends have since had theirs forgiven under the Biden programs. I cannot tell you what a huge relief that has been, not having that loan hanging over my head.
All those airlines took cheap shots at Southwest when it had its meltdown. I’m sure Southwest execs and employees are enjoying the Schadenfreude.
I’ve had it with this shitty state, ugh. My power is out again and it’s not even raining. Everything in Texas sucks😡
That is how you do government. When you appoint young people to these positions, no surprise that they move quickly.
I would die from anxiety if I was that person who caused that software error. It is like your worst nightmare.
A friend was supposed to fly from Boston back to Florida a week ago but that flight got canceled and then her rescheduled flight got canceled in this mess. She finally boarded her flight back to Florida this morning.
Canceled United flight on Sunday. Had to fly Monday.
I flew Southwest last Friday night and the airports at NY, Baltimore and STL were filled with people melting all the way down. It was a sh*tshow. We typically fly SW and likely will for the foreseeable future. I don’t care if they’re running off a tamagotchi from 1995 or a commodore in a basement in Texas…Southwest gets me there fast and mostly on time.
😹
Yup. Thus proving that the latest and greatest isn’t always the best. Southwest’s outage was a “sh1t happens,” compared to this palaver. They are the only airline I use within the US. They have always treated me well.
My parents were supposed to fly home from a trip on Delta Saturday morning. Cancelled flight, obvs. We got them on an American Airlines flight home late that night through good luck and stubbornness but other people in their travel group are still waiting on Delta to get their business together five days later. Embarrassing.
I got up at 4am on Monday for my Delta flight and checked after I had taken a shower…it was canceled. Their system was a mess and I couldn’t find any other flights on Delta to rebook and the customer service line said it was a 7 HOUR hold time. I chose to just cancel my trip because I didn’t want to book something else and then get stuck on the way back. Apparently there were people in the Atlanta hub waiting for 48 hours and not getting anyone at Delta to help them rebook. It was a total mess and I hope they are fined heavily.
Delta used to be the best of the best and went the longest respecting COVID’s middle seat policy at their own expense, so it makes me sad to see them stumbling so hard the last few years. They had a lot of pilots retire during the pandemic to offset losses, and you can tell they’re still struggling to recover from that hit.
(For context, I travel almost weekly for my job and have flown nearly every major airline, save for the really cheap ones like Spirit or JetBlue. Delta was always business preferred for a reason, despite the cost. Almost all of them have yet to fully recover from the pandemic, IMO. They all have issues.)
I have no idea what kind of software our local airlines here in the EU are using, as most of them were unaffected.
The biggest ones to encounter problems were Ryanair and EasyJet.
We did have a few hospitals though that had to cancel elective surgeries, and in the UK sadly most of the NHS went down.
An IT specialist here in Germany shared CrowdStrike’s TOS — and they mention *not to be used in critical infrastructure*, and among the fields that they listed are hospitals, airports, airlines. I’m really wondering who decided to implement it anyway, not only locally — US — but worldwide.
The same scheduling software that melted down during bad weather and caused massive problems at Delta before, is causing this again now. They should be body-slammed with fines. This was preventable, all they needed to do was learn from their last catastrophe and get better software.
I flew United to Toronto on Wednesday, before the meltdown. Flew back to New York on Monday on Air Canada with absolutely no problems, other than having to circle over Poughkeepsie for a half hour due to thunderstorms/ground traffic at Newark.
When we landed at Newark, we were faced with a crush of Delta passengers still trying to get to their destinations. There were people who looked like they had been camping out at the airport for days and a mountain of unclaimed luggage in baggage claim. (When you fly from Toronto-Pearson into the US, you go through immigrations/customs in Canada, so you end up at the domestic terminals.)
I’m heading to Atlanta on JetBlue tomorrow and back to New York on Delta on Sunday. I half expect to have to take an 18 hour train trip to get home.
I have a flight in September and I am so worried there will be a system failure or the plane will go down because of poor craftmanship. What a great time for me to have an anxiety disorder!