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.
Misunderstanding the difference between fault and responsibility should be auto-disqualification for anybody in a position of leadership.
Of course Bastian knows the difference but some crappy PR/comms team decided it’s ok to gaslight the public. Gosh, PR/comms teams are the worst. We all know who majors in comms in college — drunks and stoners with no intellect. They think the whole world is as stupid as themselves, so they think their gaslighting works in crafted PR statements.
As a preemptive matter:
I speak for everybody when I say NO COMMENTS FROM TIM DUNN PLEASE
Tim, I and the readership of this website are begging you not to clog up these comments with your fustian
I like delta and I don’t like pete whatever guy.
“We fail to recover for days unlike every other carrier because of our own sh**y processes and tech, and you want to hold us accountable as a regulator instead of being the feckless agency you’ve been under most of your docile predecessors? How dare you, don’t you know who I am?” – Ed Bastian, Delta.
There we go, fixed the quote for him.
When a service provider fails, the company that contracted with the service provider may not be at fault but they are responsible since the company had complete control over whether to contract with the service provider.
TIMMY!
Don’t like either of them. I suggest that a foremost expert in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel propose a cage-fight match between the two, with money raised to go to charity. I would make a serious donation to see that one…
typical government bureaucratic liberal that has to remind everybody of their responsibilities because they don’t have any accomplishments outside of politics
@SFO/EWR
I can be SAN/EWR traveling Monday. I happen to like Delta and Tim Dunn so you don’t speak for me and the others who feel the same. BTY, SFO now sucks thanks to the politics of you and your lib perps.
SDRon, congrats for defending clear incompetence on the part of Delta.
Hard to decide which of the two is more loathsome.
Super childish behavior from DL. I like them and think that pete is an imbecile, but DL is so in the wrong here with their reaction to their IT meltdown. No one cares that it is not your fault, it is still your responsibility to get passengers to their destination. If they had to find their own way because you hung them out to dry, you owe them compensation. I can’t believe that DL is trying to get away with this while SQ is getting sued for quickly responding to and compensating passengers, no questions asked, for something that is also not their fault!
When are we going to start requiring managing information systems training in Business school?
The airline industry has gone from being at the forefront of technology adoption to the one of the largest users of legacy systems.
The a hole airlines need to be chopped up and sent back to the drawing board.
Oh and F the employees too. If I have to listen to another 60k Betty or 500k Tom whine about pushing another bottom or pour a G&T. I’m going to vomit on them, well maybe near them. I don’t want to go to jail, not yet anyway.
I think I’d rather hear from Mr Dunn than Mr “your people” SFO/EWR.