U.S. regulators are investigating why Delta Air Lines failed to recover as quickly as other airlines from a global technology breakdown and whether Delta’s treatment of passengers stranded by canceled and delayed flights violated federal rules.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on Tuesday announced the investigation into Delta’s response to the outage, which he said has affected more than half a million of the airline’s passengers.
A Delta official said the airline expects to return to normal operations by the end of the week.
Delta and its Delta Connection partners canceled more than 500 flights Tuesday. That was down by more than half from Monday but still accounted for nearly two-thirds of all canceled flights in the United States, according to tracking platform FlightAware.
Many airlines were affected when cybersecurity company CrowdStrike sent a faulty update to more than 8 million Microsoft computers around the world late last week. Most of them reduced cancellations to roughly normal levels by the end of the weekend.
Atlanta-based Delta and its partners have canceled more than 6,500 flights since Friday, far more than any other airline, according to figures from FlightAware and travel-data provider Cirium.
Buttigieg said his department will investigate “how it could be that days after the other airlines are back to normal, Delta is still canceling hundreds of flights.”
At a news conference, Buttigieg said the Transportation Department will also examine Delta’s customer service, including “unacceptable” lines for customer service and reports that unaccompanied minors were stranded at airports. He said the department has received more than 3,000 complaints about the airline’s breakdown.
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” affected by the disruptions.
John Laughter, Delta’s chief of operations, said the airline was moving planes, pilots and flight attendants “to where they need to be so we can return to normal operations by the end of the week.”
The collapse at Delta has been stunning for an outfit that was widely viewed as the best big U.S. airline — the most profitable before and after the pandemic, and the best-run. In recent years, Delta has almost always ranked near the top among all U.S. carriers for on-time performance.
Delta appears to rely more than other airlines on systems that run on Microsoft Windows. The airline said upward of half its technology systems are Windows-based, including a key tool used to schedule pilots and flight attendants. That system could not keep up with the high number of changes triggered by the outage
