Delta cancels more flights due to technical glitch

Delta Air Lines canceled hundreds of flights today, hours after Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg specifically singled out the airline as it struggles for three days to recover from a global software outage that grounded flights around the world.

Buttigieg said Sunday that his office had received complaints about Delta’s customer service and warned that the airline must provide adequate assistance and refunds to its customers. Delta canceled about 1,300 flights on Sunday, about the same number as each of the previous two days, and delayed another 1,600 flights, according to flight-tracking website FlightAware. The cancellations represented about a third of scheduled flights.

Delta’s cancellations today — 650 as of 9 a.m. ET (3 a.m. Hawaii time) — represent about 17% of scheduled departures.

Friday’s technical outage hit airlines particularly hard. A flawed update to CrowdStrike, whose software is used around the world, forced Allegiant Air, American Airlines, Spirit Airlines and United Airlines to ground flights, the Federal Aviation Administration said.

Delta has been the slowest to restore operations, canceling about 1,200 flights on Friday and Saturday, according to FlightAware, while cancellations for other airlines have been limited to hundreds or dozens.

In a statement on Sunday, Delta CEO Ed Bastian apologized to customers. “Canceling a flight is always our last resort, and something we do not take lightly,” he said.

The outage, which disrupted devices running Microsoft Windows software, affected one of Delta’s crew tracking tools, Bastian said.

Software that helps airlines schedule and track pilots and flight attendants can be an Achilles heel for companies trying to recover from major disruptions to their operations.

Days before Christmas 2022, several U.S. airlines were severely hampered by bad weather, but the problems were most severe at Southwest Airlines, which lacked the equipment it needed to deal with the weather. In addition, a system the company used to match crews to flights couldn’t keep up with a large number of changes, at one point forcing the company to manually reschedule pilots and flight attendants.

Southwest, one of the largest U.S. airlines, canceled nearly 17,000 flights — more than a third of its scheduled flights — in the last 10 days of that year. The episode cost the company more than $1 billion and severely damaged its reputation for efficiency and punctuality.

Delta appears to be outperforming Southwest, but the increase in cancellations and delays three days after the technology outage raises questions about why the airline is having so much more trouble than other companies recovering from the technology outage. Delta has marketed itself as a premium airline and was widely regarded by Wall Street analysts as one of the most profitable and best-run companies in the industry.

The company said it had offered all customers who had booked a flight between Friday and Sunday travel waivers, allowing them to make one-time changes to their flight without incurring a fee. Delta said it was offering meal vouchers, hotel accommodations and transportation where available.

However, some passengers reported that Delta did not offer them hotel rooms when their flights were canceled, forcing people to make their own travel arrangements or sleep in airport terminals.

Buttigieg said in a social media post Sunday night that the Department of Transportation had received hundreds of complaints about the airline. Delta should provide prompt refunds to customers who don’t want rebooked flights and timely reimbursements for food and hotel stays for those affected by the delays, he said.

“No one should have to be stranded in an airport all night or wait on hold for hours to speak to a customer service representative,” Buttigieg said, adding that customers should report airlines that fail to meet their customer service requirements to the agency.

Airlines initially treated the outage as something inherently outside their control, with their only obligation to passengers being to rebook free of charge. But the Department of Transportation said Friday that the software glitch was within the airlines’ control and that U.S. carriers must compensate affected customers for flight disruptions.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.