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U.S. NEWSTuesday 9 August 2016

Delta resumes some service after hours of global outage

DANICA KIRKA Delta Air Lines passengers stand in line after flights resumed Monday, Aug. 8, 2016, in Salt Lake overlapping and compli-
DAVID KOENIG City, following a computer outage. Delta Air Lines delayed or canceled hundreds of flights Mon- cated systems to operate
Associated Press day after its computer systems crashed, stranding thousands of people on a busy travel day. flights, schedule crews and
LONDON (AP) — Twelve run ticketing, boarding, air-
hours after a power out- (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer) port kiosks, websites and
age knocked out its com- mobile phone apps. Even
puter systems worldwide, global disruption, discover- flight-status information on The departure boards said brief outages can snarl traf-
Delta Air Lines was strug- ing that they were strand- its website. her plane was leaving on fic and cause long delays.
gling Monday to resume ed only after making it At noon inside New York’s time. She received differ- That has afflicted airlines in
normal operations and through security and see- LaGuardia Airport, Fran- ent answers from three the U.S. and abroad.
clear backlogs of passen- ing other passengers sleep- cesca Villardi still had no Delta employees, one of Last month, Southwest Air-
gers stranded by canceled ing on the floor. Delta said idea when her 11:50 a.m. whom said she would be lines canceled more than
flights. that the outage caused flight to Fort Lauderdale, traveling to Cincinnati first. 2,000 flights over several
By early afternoon, Delta a lag in posting accurate Florida, would depart. “This is not organized at days after an outage that
said it had canceled 451 all,” said the 51-year-old it blamed on a faulty net-
flights. Tracking service professional organizer from work router.
FlightStats Inc. counted Pembroke Pines, Florida. United Airlines suffered a
2,000 delayed flights — Delta said that almost series of massive IT melt-
about one third of the air- 1,700 of its scheduled 6,000 downs after combining its
line’s entire schedule. flights had operated by technology systems with
Delta representatives said mid-afternoon. The airline those of merger partner
the airline was investigat- posted a video apology Continental Airlines.
ing the cause of the melt- by CEO Ed Bastian, who Lines for British Airways at
down. They declined to stood in the airline’s tech- some airports have grown
describe whether the air- nology center and assured longer as the carrier up-
line’s information-technol- customers that employees dates its systems.
ogy system had enough were working hard to re- On Monday in Richmond,
built-in redundancies to sume normal operations. Virginia, Delta gate agents
recover quickly from a hic- A power outage at an At- were writing out boarding
cup like a power outage. lanta facility at around 2:30 passes by hand. In Tokyo,
Many passengers were a.m. local time initiated a dot-matrix printer was
frustrated that they re- a cascading meltdown, resurrected to keep track
ceived no notice of a according to the airline, of passengers on a flight to
which is also based in At- Shanghai.
lanta. “Not only are their flights
A spokesman for Georgia delayed, but in the case
Power said that the com- of Delta the website and
pany believes a failure of other places are all saying
Delta equipment caused that the flights are on time
the airline’s power outage. because the airline has
He said no other customers been so crippled from a
lost power. technical standpoint,” said
Delta spokesman Eric Daniel Baker, CEO of track-
O’Brien said he had no ing service FlightAware.
information on the report com. Many passengers,
and that the airline was still like Bryan Kopsick, 20, from
investigating. Richmond, were shocked
Flights that were already that computer glitches
in the air when the out- could cause such turmoil.
age occurred continued “It does feel like the old
to their destinations, but days,” Kopsick said. “May-
flights on the ground re- be they will let us smoke on
mained there. the plane, and give us five-
Airlines depend on huge, star meals in-flight too!”
In Las Vegas, stranded
passengers were sleeping
on the floor, covered in red
blankets. When boarding
finally began for a Minne-
apolis flight — the first to
take off — a Delta worker
urged people to find other
travelers who had wan-
dered away from the gate
area, or who might be
sleeping off the delays.
Word of the extensive
breakdown began to
spread after the airline
used a Twitter account to
notify customers that its IT
systems were down “every-
where.” q