Delta Returns To ‘Full Operations’

Photo: Ricardo630

Delta Air Lines declared itself “back to full operations” on Aug. 11, three days after an equipment failure in its data center brought the airline to its knees.

Some delays were still occurring, but the carrier appeared to have weathered the storm well. While some customers took to social media to vent about canceled flights, a remarkable number of passengers praised the carrier, particularly for the efforts of its front-line employees.

“Overall, I’d give Delta an A,” travel industry analyst Henry Harteveldt said. “They started off slowly, but they improved.” In terms of communicating with the public, “they went from a C to a B,” he said. But he agreed that the front-line staff rated “an A++.”

Harteveldt was critical of Delta’s initial statement that “a power outage in Atlanta” was responsible for the situation, and noted that Georgia Power & Light lost no time in debunking the suggestion that it caused the outage. 

“Delta should have simply said that a Delta-owned transformer was the cause,” he said. 

The carrier took several steps to mitigate the effects of the crisis, which began in the early morning of Aug. 8 when a power control module in its data center failed and set off a chain of events that grounded its planes worldwide.

It deployed its fleet of Delta Private Jets, which range from six to 12 passenger seats, to transport its most frequent fliers and certain corporate customers. When one passenger complained that his canceled flight interfered with his child-care duties, Delta sent his wife flowers with an apology. Another passenger who experienced a five-hour wait in line received a $25 Starbucks gift card. 

Harteveldt noted that Delta also has built up a lot of goodwill among its passengers by maintaining excellent on-time performance and completion factor. Last year, it logged more than 100 days without a single cancellation. 

That stellar record may have allowed a bit of arrogance to seep into Delta’s attitude, Harteveldt said, which probably contributed to its initial response to the crisis. Fortunately, he said, it straightened up quickly, increasing its communications and providing more transparency. 

Ed Bastian, who became chief executive officer in May after serving as president for nine years, apologized twice and provided updates on video. Chief operating officer Gil West provided additional details on his own video. 

The next few weeks will undoubtedly be a time of self-examination for Delta, which made the decision to sell the former Northwest data center in Eagan, MN, in 2013. Harteveldt noted that “you can’t have 96% redundancy. That’s the same as no redundancy.” 

A member of the Seeking Alpha community, a crowd-sourced content service for financial markets, estimated that the cost of the meltdown could be around $48 million. Delta plans to spend $150 million on new technology this year.

With Delta’s recent event, all four of the largest U.S. carriers have experienced technology crises over the last year. 

In July 2015, a failed router degraded network connectivity for various applications and disrupted United’s operations. At the time, Gartner senior analyst Joe Skorupa told InfoWorld that simple failover mechanisms only work for total failures that can be immediately detected. And for many other network problems, redundancy doesn’t help because routers are all supposed to work together to get packets where they need to go.

Last September, American Airlines experienced an outage cause by unspecified “connectivity issues.” 

On July 20, a “partial failure” of a router brought Southwest down, causing a week of havoc and costing an estimated $54 million (the Dallas Morning News did the math).