Estimated read time: 6-7 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
SALT LAKE CITY — At least half of all Delta Air Lines flights Monday were delayed or canceled after a power outage knocked out the airline's computer systems worldwide.
About 17 hours after the outage at one of its facilities, Delta was struggling to resume normal operations and clear a backlog of stranded passengers. It sought to appease frustrated customers by offering refunds and $200 travel vouchers.
By 5 p.m., Delta officials said they had canceled more than 740 flights, although computer systems were fully functioning again. Tracking service FlightStats Inc. counted more than 2,400 delayed flights.
In a scene that played out in a number of airports Monday, Delta passengers hoping to catch flights out of Salt Lake City International Airport muddled through steady lines as the airline worked to get its systems back up and its planes in the air.
Delta representatives said the airline was investigating the cause of the meltdown. They declined to describe whether the airline's information-technology system had enough built-in redundancies to recover quickly from a hiccup like a power outage.
For passengers, hardship from the early morning meltdown was compounded by the fact that Delta's flight-status updates weren't working either. Instead of being able to stay home, many passengers only learned about the flight problems when they arrived at the airport.
Amid those Salt Lake City International Airport passengers who had quietly resigned themselves to the lingering delays as flights resumed, however, were scenes of people arriving only to check departure boards and cry out in frustration when they realized their trip had been canceled.
Small children played on the floor in piled luggage while their parents asked for help from Delta employees at check-in kiosks. Drivers camped out in the park-and-wait lot watched flight status displays that showed long lists of delays.
After two hours waiting in line and talking to Delta representatives, members of the Italian-Japanese pro cycling team Nippo-Vini Fantini trying to get home after the Tour of Utah accepted defeat and headed for a hotel. Their flight out of Salt Lake City had been canceled, and the next option to reschedule wasn't until Tuesday morning.
The airline gave the group — five cyclists and nine staff members — vouchers for a hotel and breakfast, but when it came to finding a ride back to the city that could handle all their luggage and more than a dozen special suitcases loaded with bikes and gear, they were on their own.
Elisa Corsi, a member of the team's office staff, was looking for a way Monday to transport the exhausted cyclists and all their gear.
"For us it's a problem, but for the riders it's a bigger problem because they are tired after the race and we have to move (the luggage) by ourselves," Corsi said. "The airport doesn't have a depot for the extra luggage, so we have to take the bags to the hotel and come back tomorrow morning."
Corsi and her husband, also a member of the team's office staff, don't usually travel with the cyclists but made a special trip for the Tour of Utah. This is the first time the team has seen this dramatic of a delay, Corsi said.
The Associated Press reported throughout the day that many passengers were frustrated they received no notice of a global disruption, discovering that they were stranded only after making it through security and seeing other passengers sleeping on the floor.
Kevin Landsdown, who was flying to Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., said he heard about the delays and tried looking for more information on Delta's website but found nothing. Finally he came to Salt Lake City International in hopes of learning more and found that his flight had been delayed three hours.
"The biggest problem is the Delta website didn't give me any information, so I had to actually come here, and it wouldn't let me check in, wouldn't let me check delays. It wouldn't let me check anything," he said. "I've been traveling on airlines for 35 years; this is nothing. You've got to be flexible in this business. If you don't, you'll drive yourself crazy."
#Delta has cancelled about 365 flights and operated 1,260+ of nearly 6,000 flights today: https://t.co/nT86YnCFndpic.twitter.com/9P3MGskskt
— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) August 8, 2016
Landsdown and his wife, of Maggie Valley, North Carolina, were staying in Utah for several weeks to visit their daughter and son-in-law.
Delta officials said that about 3,300 of the airline's nearly 6,000 scheduled flights had operated by 5 p.m. The airline posted a video apology by CEO Ed Bastian.
A power outage at an Atlanta facility at around 2:30 a.m. EDT initiated a cascading meltdown, according to the airline, which is also based in Atlanta.
A spokesman for Georgia Power said that the company believes a failure of Delta equipment caused the airline's power outage. He said no other customers lost power.
Delta spokesman Eric O'Brien said he had no information on the report and that the airline was still investigating.
Flights that were already in the air when the outage occurred continued to their destinations, but flights on the ground remained there, according to the AP.
Cathy and Steve Usher, of Chicago, were leaving Utah after their son's wedding when the outage hit. Their daughter, who was to leave a few hours ahead of them on a red-eye flight, was in line to board about 1 a.m. when she was told the airline was experiencing "computer problems," her parents said.
"She was boarding and they said, 'We're having a computer problem. Our computers are running slow,' so they had everyone sit down (at the gate) and then the computers went down," Steve Usher said.
Steve and Cathy Usher, who were waiting for their own flight Monday morning, questioned what could have happened to take down Delta's systems as well as any backups.
"For something to go down worldwide, that's a pretty significant glitch," Cathy Usher said.
Airlines depend on huge, overlapping and complicated systems to operate flights, schedule crews and run ticketing, boarding, airport kiosks, websites and mobile phone apps. Even brief outages can snarl traffic and cause long delays.
Last month, Southwest Airlines canceled more than 2,000 flights over several days after an outage that it blamed on a faulty network router.
We are investigating the cause of today’s outage, but our focus right now is on our customers and getting our operations back to normal.
— Delta (@Delta) August 8, 2016
United has suffered a series of notorious delays since it merged with Continental as the technological systems of the two airlines clashed.
Lines for British Airways at some airports have grown longer as the carrier updates its systems.
On Monday in Richmond, Virginia, Delta gate agents were writing out boarding passes by hand. In Tokyo, a dot-matrix printer was resurrected to keep track of passengers on a flight to Shanghai, the AP reported.
Technology that appeared to be working sometimes issued bad information. Flight-status systems, including airport screens, incorrectly showed flights on time.
"Not only are their flights delayed, but in the case of Delta, the website and other places are all saying that the flights are on time because the airline has been so crippled from a technical standpoint," said Daniel Baker, CEO of tracking service FlightAware.com.
Contributing: Peter Samore
