Things are starting to head back to normality for Delta after the major IT outage they had that brought the airline to a halt today.
Delta Air Lines Boeing 767-400ER “The Breast Cancer Foundation” at London Heathrow – Image, Economy Class and Beyond
There’s some interesting background on ArsTechnica, pointing to issues in a Delta data centre. 650 flights today have faced the operational axe, with delays and cancellations still to follow.
And putting my IT engineers hat on, there’s nothing worse than a site doing a full-on brown-out on you. I know – I’ve been there once or twice to find power out, air conditioning blasting out hot air when they should be cold, UPS’s dead and your first line service desk holding back the flood of calls.
However, sometimes it isn’t the actual event that’s important – its how you deal with that event afterwards that is more important.
You can spend hours navel gazing and examining issue after issue – and that needs to be done eventually. The first step is to restore services as much as possible, and keep your customer happy.
Delta have put out a video apologising for the mess in the first instance:
In addition, Delta have been communicating, with information updates, waivers and apologies
Delta is allowing rebooking of fights free of charge between the 8th and 12 August. Dates after the 12th August are subject to any fare changes, with the flight change costs waived.
If your flight is significantly delayed, you are entitled to a refund.
At this juncture Delta is not accepting unaccompanied minors who have not commenced their journeys yet.
Reports are coming in that Delta will be issuing US$200 vouchers for customers who have faced delays of more than 3 hours or more.
With the #DeltaOutage this morning, #Delta will give $200 vouchers to all travelers who faced a three hour or more delay today.
— Eric (@GoldboxATL) August 8, 2016
.@Delta says it’ll give $200 vouchers to all travelers who faced a three hour or more delay today. Photo: AP. pic.twitter.com/f10K3dNYGs
— Brian Sumers (@BrianSumers) August 8, 2016
A PR Newswire release confirms this
Passengers from the EU area should check if EC261/2014 applies in this situation if they are travelling from Europe to the USA with Delta. From my reading of EC261…. this isn’t a weather event, but Delta might try to argue an outage like this is an Extraordinary Circumstance that can negate the regulation.
For now, there’s an awful lot of pieces to pick up still – however, Delta has the experience to do this.
It might just take a few days to do.
For now, if your travel plans include Delta flights, it might be worth holding off a day or two for operations to normalise themselves.
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Cook says
When it is Delta’s own equipment that fails, it hardly qualifies as an Extraordinary Circumstance beyond their control. Absolute Nuts! It appears like Delta is trying to turn a short term profit for their own screw up, whatever it was. -C.