US investigating Delta’s flight cancellations, faltering response to global tech outage

U.S. regulators are investigating how Delta Air Lines is treating passengers affected by canceled and delayed flights as the airline struggles to recover from a global technology outage.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg announced the Delta investigation on the X social media platform Tuesday “to ensure the airline is following the law and taking care of its passengers during continued widespread disruptions.”

KOMO News talked with several Delta customers caught up in the fallout from the global outage. “I didn’t know the world was so dependent on one or two things, and it just cascaded like this,” said Devang Thakkar.

He traveled to New York City with his wife, two children, and their grandparents and then got stuck there for several days, victims of the global tech meltdown that crippled Delta Airlines operating systems. He told KOMO News they were fortunate to find a hotel that had two rooms available, and they spent time in the city’s parks, waiting to get a flight out.

“Delta said the next available flight was Thursday, and that just didn’t work for us that long,” said Thakkar. So, he bought tickets for his entire family on another airline. Thakkar’s family was seated one row behind Will Seyffer, who was in the same situation, with his wife and two young children.

“Employees have expressed frustration that they are ready to help, but they can’t. So yeah, it’s a bummer,” Seyffer told KOMO News.

Seyffer also paid out-of-pocket for new flights and hotel rooms for five days while they were stranded in New York City. KOMO News talked with both fathers as they were waiting in the checked baggage line at Sea-Tac International Airport, trying to find their luggage, which arrived earlier on a Delta flight.

“So they put me on a flight that I couldn’t cancel because the app was down, so my bags are already heading that way,” explained Seyffer. That’s the app another traveler told KOMO News did not work for her. Her flight from Seattle to Boston was canceled Monday morning.

“Nobody answered for six and a half hours, so I came back here to the airport and stayed in this line for about an hour,” she explained.

That, she explained, was after she took a ride-share all the way downtown to the closest hotel she found with a reservation. But, when she arrived at the Charter Hotel Seattle, Curio Collection by Hilton, at 12:30 am Tuesday, she was told there was no room available.

“I had a confirmation number. I got there at 12:30 at night. The guy said oh no, we don’t have any rooms. We’ve been accepting reservations all day, we can’t help the system’s broken,” she explained.

“I sat in the lobby until two in the morning, and now I’m back here (at the airport).” She told KOMO News that a Delta agent did rebook her on another flight, but it was on standby.

And that’s another issue that Sea-Tac is having right now. Enough space to handle people in that situation. Spokesperson Perry Cooper told KOMO that construction throughout the pre-security spaces forced the removal of seating. Airlines will not check bags too many hours before a flight, forcing stuck travelers to wait outside security. Cooper told KOMO that there are only two restaurants for people outside security. Cooper said they’ve tried to get more options, but business owners prefer to be inside security where people are waiting to board.

“All airline passengers have the right to be treated fairly, and I will make sure that right is upheld,” Buttigieg said.

Delta and its Delta Connection partners canceled close to 500 flights on Tuesday by midday on the East Coast, accounting for about two-thirds of all cancellations in the United States, according to FlightAware.

The outage began Thursday night into Friday morning, after a faulty software upgrade from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike to more than 8 million Microsoft computers around the world.

The Atlanta-based carrier has canceled more than 6,600 flights since the outage started, far more than any other airline, according to figures from FlightAware and travel-data provider Cirium.

Delta said it was cooperating with the investigation.

“We remain entirely focused on restoring our operation after cybersecurity vendor CrowdStrike’s faulty Windows update rendered IT systems across the globe inoperable,” an airline spokesperson said in a statement. “Across our operation, Delta teams are working tirelessly to care for and make it right for customers impacted by delays and cancellations as we work to restore the reliable, on-time service they have come to expect from Delta.”

Delta has said upward of half its technology systems run on Microsoft Windows, including a tool the airline uses to schedule pilots and flight attendants. That system could not keep up with the high number of changes triggered by the outage.

The Transportation Department said it launched the investigation after seeing Delta’s continued widespread flight disruptions “and reports of concerning customer service failures.”

The department said the investigation will evolve as it “processes the high volume of consumer complaints we have already received against Delta.”

Investigators are likely to focus on whether Delta is complying with federal rules and offering prompt refunds to passengers whose flights are canceled or significantly delayed. In a text provided to The Associated Press, a Delta passenger whose flight was canceled Saturday was told, “If you prefer not to rebook your trip, your ticket value will automatically be available as an eCredit that can be used towards a future Delta ticket.”

Delta’s meltdown mirrors that of Southwest Airlines, which canceled nearly 17,000 flights over 15 days in December 2022. A Transportation Department investigation ended with Southwest agreeing to pay a $35 million fine as part of a $140 million settlement.

Southwest blamed its breakdown on a winter storm, but other airlines recovered in a couple days while Southwest did not. Consumer advocates see the same pattern with Delta this month — the airline continues to blame the CrowdStrike outage while rivals such as American recovered quickly, and even United Airlines, the second-worst at cancellations, was back on track Monday.

“It’s not about the thing that caused the problem, it’s about how you recover from the problem. That’s the test of an airline,” said William McGee, a former aircraft dispatcher who is a consumer advocate at the American Economic Liberties Project, a group critical of large corporations.