Delta Flight Cancellations Continue As It Struggles To Recover From Tech Outage

Three days after planes around the world were grounded by a technology outage, Delta Air Lines was struggling to get stranded passengers to their destinations on Monday and was the only carrier still canceling hundreds of flights as it raced to update its systems.

The company’s performance was much worse than other large U.S. air carriers like American Airlines and United Airlines, which were operating with few cancellations, and appeared to stem from decisions it made when its systems first went down, analysts said.

The secretary of transportation, Pete Buttigieg, singled out Delta on Sunday for its slow recovery and said that his office had received numerous complaints about Delta’s customer service. He warned that the carrier must provide its customers with adequate assistance and refunds. Delta canceled about 1,300 flights on Sunday, roughly the same number as each of the previous two days, and delayed another 1,600, according to the flight tracking website FlightAware. The cancellations represented about a third of the airline’s scheduled flights.

Delta’s cancellations on Monday — 815 as of 3 p.m. Eastern time — accounted for about 21 percent of its scheduled departures, according to FlightAware. Another 34 percent of its flights were delayed.

The tech outage on Friday hit airlines especially hard. A flawed update from CrowdStrike, whose software is used around the world, forced Delta, Allegiant Air, American Airlines, Spirit Airlines and United Airlines to ground flights.

Delta has been the slowest to restore its operations. American and United had canceled fewer than 50 flights each as of noon on Monday, according to FlightAware.