Delta offering vouchers to travelers impacted by Monday’s outage

The issue, and finger-pointing, about the power outage that triggered the event sent their computers systems into a death spiral won’t fix the impact to their reputation or their bottom line.

Dave Holtz, the airline’s senior vice-president of operations, said: “We are still operating in recovery mode”.

By early afternoon, Delta said it had canceled about 530 flights as it moved planes and crews to “reset” its operation.

Confusion among passengers on Monday was compounded as Delta’s flight-status updates crashed as well.

As of Monday afternoon, Delta only operated 1,679 of its almost 6,000 scheduled flights. The airline was back online after a number of hours Monday, but the outages were so widespread that it is still dealing with the ripple effects a day later.

Delta Air Lines will be handing out refunds and travel vouchers as penance for the latest computer outage to knock a major airline off stride.

A waiver has been issued from Delta for customers traveling on August 8-12.

Delta Air Lines said it expected to cancel almost 250 flights Tuesday morning, and that about 200 other flights would be delayed after Monday’s computer outage at its corporate headquarters in Atlanta. And Delta said it gave hotel vouchers to “several thousand” customers including 2,000 in Atlanta.

Analysts say such outages in older systems also are becoming more common as carriers continue to automate flight-related services and a host of behind-the-scenes activities involving everything from worker schedules to electronic arrival and departure displays.

A spokesman for the local electric company, Georgia Power, said the problem started with a piece of Delta equipment called a switchgear, which direct flows within a power system. He said no other customers lost power.

Tuesday’s interruptions to America’s second largest airline can be attributed to Monday’s system-wide power outage at Delta’s headquarters in Atlanta.

Some passengers said they were shocked that computer glitches could cause such turmoil.

Ryan Shannon, another passenger on the Lexington-to-New York flight, said passengers boarded, were asked to exit, waited about 90 minutes and then got back on the plane.

“There is always a delay, or weather, or something”, he said.