Delta Air Lines is finally recovering from one of the worst airline meltdowns that has been experienced in this country. Yet the airline’s public statements have been little more than finger pointing and self-congratulations despite the misery they’re putting both employees and customers through. It’s nearly as bad as Southwest in December 2022, yet they aren’t getting the same level of recriminations and aren’t as generous with customers as Southwest was.
The airline is out with another statement from the CEO and it’s appalling. All other airlines were up and running quickly after the CrowdStrike outage. He still accepts zero responsibility. That shouldn’t be surprising.
For the last decade I’ve flown first class @Delta for every single flight.
Never again.
Y’all just lost a customer for life.
Horrible customer service. Cancelled flights with no reimbursement. No answers from anyone.
RIP, @Delta, you’re dead to me. pic.twitter.com/ln7AJAr0j1
— Jason Helmes (@anymanfitness) July 22, 2024
Delta collapsed. They lost track of crews, and couldn’t assign them to flights. They were making announcements in terminals asking anyone who worked for them that could fly to just show up at gates. Planes were out of position and not getting maintenance. It was a disaster all-around – and one not experienced by their competitors. Yet here’s what Ed Bastian had to say:
Since the CrowdStrike outage late last week, Delta’s team of the best professionals in the business has been working around the clock to restore the reliable, on-time operation you’ve come to know and expect when you fly with us.
- CrowdStrike screwed up
- We fixed it – because we’re “the best professionals in the business” never mind that our team was last in the industry to recover.
While our initial efforts to stabilize the operations were difficult and frustratingly slow and complex, we have made good progress this week and the worst impacts of the CrowdStrike-caused outage are clearly behind us.
- Repeat again that this is CrowdStrike’s fault, not our fault.
Delays and cancellations were down 50% Tuesday compared to Monday, and we anticipate cancellations Wednesday to be minimal. Thursday is expected to be a normal day, with the airline fully recovered and operating at a traditional level of reliability.
- After 5 days of misery things have stabilized. I called it a day ago when cancellations were still abysmal.
I know the last few days have been difficult. To our customers who were impacted, I want to thank you for your patience and apologize again for the disruption to your travel.
- Finally an ‘I’m sorry’
- But only to a limited group of people
- It’s an apology ‘again’ even though there really hasn’t been a clear I’m sorry – certainly never an I’m sorry that accepts fault
- And here it comes only after blaming someone else.
We understand how important travel is in your lives, and we remain committed to taking care of those whose flights may still be impacted, with meals, hotel accommodations and ground transportation offered through vouchers and reimbursements. We’re also providing impacted customers with Delta SkyMiles and travel vouchers as a further gesture of apology.
- We were unwilling to put people on other airlines
- There are reports from passengers refused hotel and meal vouchers
- A previous Delta email made clear they wouldn’t cover non-refundable travel plans that were missed, like hotels. That’s even when the hotels were booked through Delta, Delta wouldn’t refund the booking and give up the commission.
- SkyMiles compensation has been as low as 4,000 points.
My buddy is there
He sent me this photo
said he’s 97% sure this lady just peed on floor while waiting 7 hours in line for customer service pic.twitter.com/m5NotJjjTK— Alan K (@itsalankline) July 22, 2024
Delta was telling customers it would take 17 to 20 hours to reach customer service. It made Delta look bad in social media. Then they just stopped telling customers what the wait times would be.
The airline directed everyone to their website and app for updates and rebooking, but those failed. Even where seats were available, customers couldn’t grab them. With so many displaced passengers hitting their systems so hard for help, those systems failed too. As one software engineer correspondent tells me, this is called a “thundering herd” problem.
All these clients have been trying to talk to a server for a long time, couldn’t and so they all have a lot to say when it comes back. The very act of the server acknowledging all those clients – let alone actually doing the calculations or getting the information the client wants – can take the server down again. In practice, your own trusted clients are DDoSing you!
Delta has had major IT outages in the past, and has recovered poorly. They’ve promised to fix things so that it never happens again, but they don’t. They even let IT staff go this past fall.
Delta vs. United in Minneapolis. And I picked the wrong team, my friends. pic.twitter.com/1FibWqXiMC
— Brian Brenberg (@BrianBrenberg) July 22, 2024
Fixing airline systems that are fundamentally broken is really hard. It’s tough to “self-break” systems and self-test, the way that Netflex pioneered with Chaos Monkey. If a customer loses access to streaming briefly while the system “randomly terminat[es] instances in production to ensure that engineers implement their services to be resilient to instance failures” the consequences are much more modest than if an airline does it.
Major IT problems can be tough to identify and troubleshoot in advance because they show up when there is a lot of traffic, under severe stress, with millions of people trying to do things at once that testers may not think of or combine together.
There’s tremendous humility needed here but Delta is the least humble airline. Overall they have been marginally better than competitors for years, with somewhat more reliable operations and friendlier flight crews. While they have their flaws – business class across the Atlantic on workhorse Boeing 767s actually lags the inflight product of United and American – they’ve built a brand by exaggerating their prowess for a very long time. They promote it both to customers and employees. At some level they even believe their own PR and have become too insular.
Delta keeps deflecting responsibility because they are corporately unable to accept it, and that’s also a big reason why they’re so vulnerable to continued problems. When Delta melts down they’re unable to recover as well as airlines that don’t think they’re above melting down.
Tim Dunn will be here shortly. He is fighting on another blog right now about how great DL is.
Gary, like Ben, has to keep milking the DL story long after it is over because it generates page clicks.
Delta’s operation today is running better than American’s – fewer cancellations and delays.
United’s meltdown last year took longer to reset the operation than DL did and DL certainly got its operation back on track faster than AA.
And UA’s CEO was on a private jet heading to his Colorado home while his company’s operation melted down at EWR and then spread across the country for far longer than 4 days.
But Gary, who lives in a world of anecdotes in an industry that serves billions of passengers per year is incapable or unwilling to use facts.
Tim, go away. Don’t read Gary’s post then. It is a well thought-out, well written post. Part fact, part opinion. But you can’t handle the truth and have to deflect. You have a serious mental issue.
Blaming it on IT after decreasing staff size in Tech, usually a sign of being too cheap because IT is expensive. Saying that it’s too difficult to stress test systems that fail under pressure is an outright lie or complete misunderstanding of how stress testing works. We do it all the time and push systems beyond the limits until they break, allowing us to identify weak links.
This CEO is clearly a liar who doesn’t accept the truth. I hope Delta’s Board of Directors fires this guy immediately and replaces him with a Tech Leader.
@ Tim — Don’t you have something better to do? Oh wait, you don’t.
I was delayed and then canceled in Chicago on Saturday (United) but back to normal Sunday. Why is Delta in so much worse shape? I have read Gary’s posts and it isnt clear to me why.
How long can a publicly traded company get away with lying in public statements to shareholders, investors, and customers?
All I know is that as a Diamond Million Miler I flew Southwest to get home from LAS on Saturday and booked on United for a last minute trip to Greece tomorrow. I just didn’t trust that Delta will have it together yet. I have been very loyal to them for 10+ years but I know for a fact that they struggle to recover. I have been stuck before. Delta loves to blame weather in Atlanta 4 days after it happened. When everything is fine, they do ok (no where as good as they used to, stranded overnight twice already this year) but as soon as something goes sideways they struggle to reset. Always have in my experience.
Tim,
AA is delayed because of WEATHER. Deltas subpar IT and weather are two different animals. Charlotte got hit with massive storms.
Good news our refunds came through last night and our rebooking on other airlines went smoothly and everybody got where they were going. I’m sure nothing will come of it but the evening news made them look awful with all the people sleeping at the airport with no assistance and 3,000 Delta complaints. Pete holding a news conference claiming the feds would launch an investigation but we know the federal government is useless at everything but collecting taxes and cancelling student loans.
@FNT
“How long can a publicly traded company get away with lying in public statements to shareholders, investors, and customers?”
Forever. It’s a permanent feature of the oligopoly (not) regulated by the captured congress.
We pay for the pain we endure. The Street and their minions at Board level pocket the cash.
We lose.
The End.
Computers are garbage con-jobs for profit to computer companies .
Executive bonuses are garbage food for pigs who dissemble .
Nothing new to see here .
I don’t know about Ed and the Executives at Delta, but Kirby and his “buddy” Andrew from AA, and all Executives lie to passengers all the times. UA fliers probably get used to it. After all, Kirby only cares about his 8-figure salary and bonuses.
@tim
AA probably is cancelling more than Delta because they had a fire in their terminal at JFK this morning and the fire department still hasn’t released it back to them. Without it, I bet AA would have less cancels/delays than DL.
To reiterate, NOBODY is worse in IROPS than Delta. They are fundamentally structured that way… Almost as a direct result of the penny pinching and corner cutting and gouging that works when the weather is good and the servers are up.
When it turns ugly? Nobody reverts to CaCa as badly as Delta. To the point of illegality here — in a cancellation? They HAVE to provide a refund option. Not scrip. Not SkyPesos. A refund.
As for the vouchers? It almost doesn’t matter when there’s no hotels and no contingency plans.
The only good news is that Delta once again reveals who they are in a pinch. And it ain’t PREMIUM.
@Solucia
Because they refuse to enter the Interline agreements that would open up options on other carriers.
Because they refuse to do contingency planning.
Because they refuse to own issues that are clearly theirs to resolve.
Because they self flagellate themselves as “the best” when they clearly aren’t when it counts.
Because, at the end of the day, they refuse to spend money to fix the problem. There’s plenty of inventory on other carriers. Delta just doesn’t want to pay to do the right thing.
@Gary – I have no particular experience directly with Delta IT.
However, my employer used the same IT product for a SIEM until a couple of years ago. Once, I got the support rep for the vendor to show me his view of their internal ticketing system and he’d left it sorted by client. While we had 25% fewer servers (so our deployment was implicitly smaller), Delta had something like 1/10th of our ticket volume.
From experience, I feel confident reading that as “Delta was checking the box” for compliance by “having a SIEM,” NOT that they were actually using it. Anyone even halfway competent that actually used it had very, very real, deep technical issues that would have required significant vendor support.
It doesn’t reflect well on IT and security leadership at Delta, which isn’t news to anyone, but is another data point to support the theory that Delta is incompetent at IT and security.
@ Gary — Why did Delta lie? To which time were you referring?
Delta customer service is terrible, in all honesty UA and AA are not much better. After safety, customer Service should be a top priority. No one is doing it particularly well. Long waits on the phone, long lines in the airport, it needs to stop. Spend the money where needed.
Can stats from the day before be at the top of this blog every day? Cancellation/Delay numbers and percentage of scheduled departures daily and YTD by the big four are relevant. At least ongoing hard facts could be digested by readers at all times and not just during delays.
Did Tim D really call out Scott Kirby’s private jet trip while Ed Bastian flew off to Paris for the Olympics in the middle of Delta’s meltdown??
Jim
By the time Ed’s flight left for Paris AA was canceling and delaying more flights than Delta
Kirby left before the end of the first day of UA’s meltdown
And the next issue that Gary should be focusing on is fears that the DOJ will block the AS/HA merger. HA stock has cratered in the last day
By the end of the year Delta will still be at the top of a very messy 2024 for US airlines
Was caught in Helsinki over the weekend by the computer meltdown. In about 2 minutes I had someone on the chat who took responsibility for getting things fixed and after a day lost because of a canceled flight they had me on Icelandair and then United to Chicago. The connection on AA was obviously a day off but I easily fixed that for no cost online and so got home without major issues.
Now obviously Finnair is far smaller than Delta, but still they were right on top of things, kept me informed of first the cancellation and then their progress in fixing the situation. If they can manage things why can’t a much bigger company with far more resources be better prepared? I wonder if Delta ever ran a simulation on what to do in such a crisis and had trained people and resources ready. Even small counties and little cities proactively practice emergency management with varying levels of drills and after-action reviews.
Re-accommodation on other airlines..
I worked for NWA then Delta through the merger and one thing that was held close to vest by DL was training on ticketing and re-accommodation on other airlines during IROPS. Permissions and tools used by ticket-counter/gate agents to make things happen were restricted, to protect revenue (protecting revenue was a common reason in Delta memos) Makes me wonder if the refusal or lack of moving customers to AA, UA, and other interline carriers was due to a lack of training on re-accom FIM ticketing or a policy not to do it.
Wow. I’m really looking forward to spending my “gifted” 10K SkyMiles on a “Premium” economy upgrade to Jacksonville… $100 value, woo-hoo!!
Bastain and the entire C-Suite and BOD are simply incapable of saying “we screwed up” and have lost all credibility with its customers and shareholders. Looking forward to the Netflix series on this avoidable debacle.
@ Tim — By the end of the year, you will hopefully be banned from here.
@Gene
Here’s hoping.
Wait Delta really does care about your total satisfaction
I heard they will be offering 100 miles for each affected passenger.
In other news they are devaluing sky mile awards once again to offset their melt down and offering complimentary tours of their oil well/ refineries for their best customers.to say thank you for your loyalty.
DELTA – Don’t Ever Let’em Tak’ya Anywhere!!
Different airlines use different systems, and some were more affected by the CrowdStrike error more than others. I don’t know the true story, but it’s not difficult for me to imagine a scenario where Delta has a heavy investment in Windows-based servers that all rely on CrowdStrike, and the repercussions for them was far worse than other companies who may use Linux, for example.
Typical “trump’s delusions of grandeur” and “blame everyone else all the time before they can blame me”.
It seems to work fine for about 1/3 of the population of this country, so why not use it?
CrowdStrike reportedly also stealth laid off over 200 engineers (including QA engineers) last year through a “Return To Office” push late last year. People who didn’t move to expensive cities and “return” to an office (including people who had never reported to an office) were fired. Clearly they didn’t really do anything and nobody working from home does anything.
Laying off people definitely juiced the quarterly earnings numbers, though!
There should be no bonuses unless earned, there should be no exorbitant salaries. There is no competition as in the past even still everything would be turned over to the big tech guys. I’m not tech savy to say the least but I dislike that it controls our lives without much backup support. Ya’ll can call me stupid but I was part of the airline industry for twenty-one years. It’s always running on a fickle budget of feast or famine but perks and pleasure are down to bare bones.
Imagine if Delta had a capable CEO who actually gave a s#!t about passengers… Oh wait, that’s Air France/KLM.
I wasdue to fly BHM-ATL-EWR on the 20th. Rebooked to the 21st via DTW. Made it do DTW but 2nd leg cancelled (‘crew issues’ per gate agent). lines were impossible, even at the car rental counters. Hertz GOLD Plus to the rescue: I was on the road by 11:30 AM to NJ!
Delta gave me 10k miles, the refund for the cancelled flight and I submitted reimbursement forms for hotel and rental car today.
Tim you are an idiot, unable to do basic math. Just look at the flight cancellations, ignoring weather considerations:
Sunday: Delta 1386 American 92
Monday: Delta 1160 American 98
Tuesday: Delta 511 American 154
Wednesday: Delta 53 American 106
Tell us again that Delta is doing a better job than American. BTW – American is not a great airline, this is not about defending them, it is about reporting the truth which is verifiable with metrics.
I think we can all agree that last week was a hot mess for everyone concerned.
Gary seems to always need to bash Delta, in particular.
Just wondering if he is still recovering from not getting his extra peanuts.
Travel in the US is trash, no matter the airline. The only reason I live here is my job requires me to, and the only time I go to the airport is to leave the country.
Shouldn’t somebody be worried about capitalism? This is the number one Airlines by customer satisfaction in multiple surveys, what does that say about the USA??
Nary a regulation to protect customers (The DOT did a valiant effort, especially in shutting down American Airlines’ initial response that “it wasn’t their fault” so customers could be totally abandoned, but has very limited tools at its disposal).
And then, of course, one party is running on a platform to strip away even this minimum of regulations fiving rights to airline passengers. Absolutely incredible how far the country has fallen.
I quit flying Delta when they made their NRA stance clear. DEI is not a concept I consider when it comes to who I want flying my plane and fixing the engines, I have other choices. Good luck Delta, it looks like you’ll need it.
@Tom Dually: Thanks for the response. We didnt have Delta in our airport for years; they came for a year or 2 before Covid and left. Just came back a month or so ago. Bottom-line they are not a choice for me, thank you. Though until this weekend they seemed to be considered the best of the 3 large competitors.
PREMIUM
Honestly don’t get why Delta seems to get so much fuss and fanfare. I’m originally from Europe and have flown AA, AS, B6, DL, HI, WN & UA since being in the US and to be honest they’re all much of a muchness. WN was my least favourite airline (yet seem to also be popular), HI, AS & B6 seemed to have the nicest crews and B6 by far the best economy product with more legroom and free WiFi – though quality of cabin interior can vary somewhat and being as NYC gets screwed with wx more than many of the other airline hubs that doesn’t help their OTP. Between the big 3 there wasn’t much to pick between the mediocrity of them all. Meanwhile DLs FF miles are worthless in comparison to AA, UA, AS and even B6. DL only have a good on time performance because they massively pad their block time. For example DFW to LGA AA block most flights at around 3h25-3h30 while DL block at 3h40-3h45. So since DOT work on A14 not D0 then those 15 minutes do make all the difference to the stats. I recall one NY-DFW flight on Delta landing 50 minutes “early” because the block time was so ridiculously long compared to reality.
I don’t like any airline. But this could have been a situation where we were hacked by the Russians or Chinese
Chaos monkey is NOTHING like what you describe it as or think it is.
Please stick to what you know. Software development breakage schemes and improving support are so far distant from each other.
Don’t barf on my app dev forum. I won’t barf on your “whine about things I don’t understand and pretend they have something to do with Delta being incompetent” forum.
Take ALL of the positive and/or negative comments about ALL of the airlines out of the equation. The biggest question is…HOW do the airlines and other industries prevent this from happening again? Obviously, the single point of failure is Crowdcrap! After Delta’s power failure 10 or so years ago, the company built a more robust power supply and built an independent but equal computer center away from headquarters. Southwest had a computer meltdown too. They changed the way their system works and that seems to be paying off in the current situation. This is problem is bigger than the airlines involved. Crowdcrap brought hospitals, movie theaters, “big box” stores down too. Don’t think for one second that this country’s adversaries don’t see this weakness… They do!
As a software engineer it seems to me that Delta is either under-investing in their IT or not doing best practices with how they manage their systems.
As far as the under-investing goes maybe their crew management software is ancient and it’s a monumental and expensive task to rewrite and modernize it.
It’s impossible to know but I’d imagine there is some lack of best practices going on. Maybe there’s some data corruption or they don’t have backups or they don’t have staff that can handle the server restoration fast enough.
It all seems like bad IT practices one way or another. I hope they learn and use this opportunity to improve their systems.
Enjoy the Delta Premium Select® experience.
My ex-wife once worked at corporate headquarters for Delta. It was never called the c-suite by employees. They referred to it as
“Mahogany Row”
And trust me the folks at mahogany row at Delta headquarters think their shit don’t stink. They are getting everything they deserve.
So they treated passengers like crap once. Come to AA – so you can be treated like crap every day.