At the end of July, CrowdStrike pushed an update that brought down computer systems all over the world. Airlines were badly affected, though none as significantly as Delta which displaced hundreds of thousands of passengers and cancelled a substantial portion of its flights for days on end.
Delta vs. United in Minneapolis. And I picked the wrong team, my friends. pic.twitter.com/1FibWqXiMC
— Brian Brenberg (@BrianBrenberg) July 22, 2024
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 had slimmed its IT operation, and after its systems collapsed it lost track of crew. While other airlines recovered, their systems continued to lag. While Delta is, in normal times, somewhat more reliable than most U.S. operations they have a history of taking longer to recover from meltdowns than other carriers.
- Throughout the ordeal and since, they’ve continued to deny any responsibility and blame CrowdStrike completely. But the incident tarnished Delta’s premium image.
- Rather than taking responsibility, this deflection has shown an arrogance that’s a real turnoff to many loyal customers. And it continues.
After Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg called Ed Bastian, ‘reminding him about his airline’s responsibilities to passengers’, the airline became more reasonable covering costs for stranded passengers. Delta had previously refused to pay for tickets that travelers were stuck buying on other airlines.
However, CEO Bastian has put Buttigieg on blast over this, claiming he was just posturing for self-serving political reasons.
“I got pretty annoyed with our Secretary of Transportation,” Bastian said, citing the department’s decision to deem disruptions stemming from the outage as “controllable.” That put airlines like Delta on the hook for covering additional costs like meals and transportation, among others.
“All that was just insane … Technology providers knock us out and then it’s our fault?” Bastian said. “You’ve got politicians running some of the cabinet offices there, and they’re doing it to make inroads and get name recognition.”
“You can imagine the conversation I had with him privately,” Bastian added to laughs.
It’s highly unusual for an airline CEO to publicly criticize its regulator. But Delta has a history of tremendous lobbying success, nearly blocking Mideast airlines from flying to the U.S. despite signed treaties (this effort culminated in an Oval Office meeting that Bastian failed to show up to), and as the airline’s CEO noted at the event where he called out Buttigieg, they’ve managed to retain their stranglehold on U.S. – Mexico flying via joint venture with Aeromexico despite DOT noticing that they intended to cancel it. As I’ve written in the past, in any 50-50 deal Delta takes the hyphen.
The irony of those that want to blame DL is that CRWD has yet to apologize directly to DL for the chaos it created around the world other than a very generic apology that also included “and our liability is capped at a small number of millions of dollars.”
THAT is the antithesis of taking responsibility – and it will cost CRWD far more than DL lost because of CRWD’s failures.
No IT company is going to put CRWD on anywhere close to the majority of their systems as DL did if any supplier can simply say that their liability for their mistakes is virtually nothing.
and DL has recovered from the CRWD effect while other airlines are STILL running worse operations year to date.
I get that some people want to keep anything going as long as they can but DL made the mistake of relying too heavily on CRWD – just like WN and UA relied too heavily on Boeing.
DL has recovered from its impact from CRWD; WN and UA will take years if they ever fully recover from Boeing’s incompetency.
Butt!gag was out of his depth the day he took the job. Was an identity politics hire from the get-go. Being the mayor of Notre Dame isn’t sufficient qualification for a cabinet post.
This thread has triggered Tim to where he is clinging to “Crowdstrike hasn’t apologized” as a basis of responsibility.
If you don’t think Delta is at fault here, then you can’t be considered a critical thinker.
The way the system is designed allowed for this to cascade throughout the operation…for days! That’s not good IT design, regardless of how much 5hey claim to be investing.
Just call a duck a duck here, Tim. DL screwed up, but in their infamous attitude will try to deflect blame in airline PR slight-of-hand.
It is a bold thing to accuse someone of posturing, then say “you can imagine what I said to him in private,” which is the definition of empty chest-thumping. It is an enthymematic statement designed to lead the audience without the responsibility of being frank or honest. In my imagination, Ed Bastion simply groveled to the Secretary of Transportation behind closed doors. Those that thump chests in public to their peers are often cowardly in direct confrontation.
SWA took care of their customers (all be it after that fact) with no problem reimbursement for reasonable expenses. Why can’t Delta do the same thing?
Patrick,
WN was fined a very large amount for DOT violations of customer care so your statement is simply not true.
WN had no choice but to rebook customers on other airlines because they do not interline w/ other domestic carriers.
DL might or might not have done the same thing and may or may not have done so to the same degree; the DOT has to issue a report.
But there is not a single airline that can immediately rebook every customer on other airlines or issue vouchers in the event of mass cancellations or delays. They simply do not have the ability = any of them – to do so on a mass scale.
After reading for several months this is the strangest mix of readers/commenters. I never expected this all over the place level of hate and political jockeying. Getting on a plane and sitting your butt in a seat isn’t rocket science. Neither is paying as little or much as you want for a ticket.. No reason to hate DL, UA or AA but I do personally hope Pete put Bastian in his place.. Pete is smarter and more well spoken than any of those CEOs whether anyone here wants to admit it or not.
These major airlines have been getting away with “murder” the past decades. They have taken major advantage since deregulation. They only care about the bottom line. Passengers be damned! Small seats no legroom, surly service from service workers to cabin crew. Unions have taken over and have caused nothing but turbulence to the flying public.
Now, when they get called out by the FAA, they scream. Pete is doing his job overseeing U.S. airlines. Its time these moronic CEOs stop getting their outrageous bonuses and run their airlines they were hired for. The buck stops with them!!!
So nice to see Tim Dunn’s comment listed first . . . no longer being a DL customer I know I can quit reading the comments and move on to another “arbiter of truth.”
Bastian should be ashamed of himself. There’s no excuse for subjecting your customers to misery and then blaming it on someone else.
I don’t care what side of the political spectrum you sit on. If you run a business and it fails to deliver, you FIX IT.
If I take my car to the shop and it falls off the rack, they pay for it. Not me.
If I go to the grocery store and see the food is spoiled, they refund it.
Airlines should have zero exception to it.
Mind you- I fly for an airline for a living and I feel they need to be held accountable. I get held accountable if something goes wrong, but they don’t? Sad.
I like that Bastian claims it was uncontrollable, yet every other airline on Earth somehow managed to control it. Try again, Sport. Delta could not control that the Crowdstrike outage happened, but Delta could control slashing IT budgets whether or not Crowdstrike was a single point of failure in their implementation.
This is yet another example of a corporation run by dolts with business degrees who have decided that IT is a cost and therefore should be trimmed aggressively. Yes, it maximizes profits as long as everything is going right, but blows up in your face as soon as something goes wrong.
Sounds like he’s posturing because a gay man was telling him what to do. He would have reacted the same way to Elaine Chao (though she wouldn’t have had the will to stand up to Delta in the first place.)
Another old man who needs to remember he’s in a new century….
@darin and @Dashoops, thanks, I assumed as much.
It’s really unfortunate the devolution of our country (mainly thanks to far-right media, Trump, and the cowards who blindly back him for monetary and political gain). Pete Buttigieg is one of the smartest humans we could possibly have in government. He is incredibly motivated and good-willed. If you believe otherwise, I’d gladly be proved wrong with specific evidence.
I’m far from a Democrat fan boy… but a warning to those who back a candidate as morally bankrupt as Trump: You and the entire country will eventually reap what you sow. I’d strongly encourage you to consume media outside of Fox News or NewsMax for at least one day. The likely reality is that you’re in a cult, and you don’t realize it. I say that with absolutely no ill-will or offense meant. I just don’t want to see the entire country drink Jim Jones’s Kool-Aid and pay the price.