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Delta Air Lines screwed up. Big time. Even the term “epic fail” is wondering how it can live up to the complete mess Delta has caused.
Delta was one of the airlines affected by the CrowdStrike meltdown late last week. While other carriers such as United and American bounced back relatively quickly, Delta seems to barely have a hold of a life preserver.
The problem now seems to lie with Delta’s crew scheduling and tracking systems. But don’t worry: the problems should be fixed sometime around this weekend — but hopefully sooner.
Meanwhile, there are some genuinely sad tales of woe:
@Delta I’m emailing Mr Sebastian…this is ridiculous. My son missed his dad’s funeral and now his return flight is screwed!! \#Delta \#Crowdstrike pic.twitter.com/6ecaYfDUdY
— Lindalu056 (@lindalu019) July 21, 2024
I’m sure “Mr. Sebastian” is not the worst thing Delta CEO Ed Bastian been called.
@Delta thanks again for nothing. Missed my mothers funeral. 25 years of loyalty but NO MORE
— Electron Jockey (@ElectronJockey1) July 21, 2024
Hey @Delta FIGURE IT OUT! Now our 2nd flight cancelled after originally scheduled Friday. Thousands of dollars lost, bag no where to be found, missed wedding, spent birthday at airport. Glad our first trip in years since we have two young kids went so well. Oh and 40+ hrs on hold
— TitleTown (@southcoyotes) July 21, 2024
Because of @Delta my brother will miss our uncle’s military funeral in Dallas today.
And FWIW, @AmericanAir got me here safe, sound, and on-time.
— Jay Lassiter (@jay\_lass) July 22, 2024
beacuse of @Delta i missed my cruise vacation this week and lost a lot of money
— Tiana Marie (@TiMarieStyle) July 23, 2024
Why Was Delta Hit So Hard While Other Airlines Recovered?
Redditor “gruss_gott” is apparently a former Northwest Airlines employee. (For those not familiar, Delta and Northwest merged in 2008). They provide this insight:
Former NWA employee here (from many years ago), familiar with Delta’s IT ops.
- NWA had quarterly IT ops Business Continuity drills, i.e., simulate full internet-down / network-down / key system down situations. Delta discontinued them. (and probably the infrastructure required to account for and maintain business continuity in these situations)
- NWA had full 24/7 permanent, local, on-call IT ops staffing (ie. “building J”) with only new dev outsourced. Delta replaced many local ops staff with offshore and/or contractors.
- NWA had full, updated business capability maps, i.e., map each core business capability to the systems required to support it, and then each system had a planned back-up. Delta disbanded that team.
In short, this is an IT ops supply chain fail:
Delta management removed internal redundancy, and increased external systems complexity, ie making their ops dependent on multiple outside vendors & contractors, in pursuit of cost reduction with no consideration to business continuity risk.
Now those risks have all triggered and Delta ops is f*cked.
It’s nothing less than complete & utter mismanagement Delta senior leaders have been warned about for almost 2 decades.
The (rather interesting) “Hot-Cress7492” added:
… What went sideways is their crew scheduling was a synchronous process that interacted with many many other systems. Once that came up, there ETL/API feeds just crushed this one system with updates and it could not keep up. Delta’s only option was to scale it vertically for a short term fix, but it still couldn’t keep up.
Last time I checked, planes need pilots and flight crew, so yeah, go get your GA’s to fix the gate computer for passengers who can’t board a plane because… there’s no crew…
Grabbing computers out of a storage room doesn’t fix the issue – you’re literally thinking like a mom and pop computer guy. You need to learn more about enterprise.
It was also mentioned that their entire tech stack has over 1500 applications that likely interact with each other. What their CIO is probably thinking right now is: “how do we pare down the number of applications and why don’t we have a full data flow diagram showing how things work from end-to-end.”
They need to find their weak points and saturation points where they can implement horizontal scaling, not vertical. Sadly, the fix for this comes down to money, which the CEO is shoveling into his pocket, not reinvesting to make the company better…
I’m no business expert. But it sounds to me like money and general mismanagement are to blame.
Have You Lost Faith in Delta?
The initial CrowdStrike failure wasn’t directly Delta’s fault. The airline must take some responsibility because it problems were caused by one of its vendors.
But for an airline that talks up its “premium” brand — and charges some hefty airfares — this is unacceptable.
Part of me thinks Delta will learn from this and invest in better IT — and we won’t see a problem this scale again. For the most part, though, I won’t be surprised if Delta doesn’t make this fix a priority. They’ll probably think CrowdStrike won’t fail again — so the chances of this screw-up repeating itself are slim, right? You have to those stockholders happy. (I don’t hold any Delta stock, FWIW.)
Are you willing to forgive Delta for this and trust them with your future travel? Or are you done with Delta?
Please share your comments below.
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I never have to better than the Almighty. I just have to be better than the Alternative. Are UA or AA really that much better (WN doesn’t offer a lot internationally)? And if you are a hub captive in ATL/DTW/MSP/SLC do you really have a choice?
I guess my question is … are you and Rene now DONE WITH DELTA after this unfortunate – albeit disasterous – one-up of a meltdown. Seriously, think about how foolish this click bait headline sounds. The coverage of this meltdown on all the blog sites has been simply, astonishingly disappointing.
“…are you and Rene now DONE WITH DELTA after this unfortunate – albeit disasterous [sic] – one-up of a meltdown.”
You read this blog. You know where we travel to and from. You know that Delta is the best option to some of those destinations. So, probably not.
“Seriously, think about how foolish this click bait headline sounds.”
How? I showed examples of missed funerals, vacations, weddings, and more. Then I asked readers if they’re done with Delta. Please, explain how it’s click bait. Then, if it is, tell me why you took the bait.
“The coverage of this meltdown on all the blog sites has been simply, astonishingly disappointing.”
What would you have liked to see? In fact, maybe this is your sign to start your own! I’m excited for you —- and can’t wait to read what you pump out on a daily or near-daily basis!
Where is Delta’s board of directors? Why are they allowing corporate management, who work for them and the shareholders, to knowingly lie to customers? And at what point is a publicly traded company lying to customers and, ultimately, shareholders in public statements now a serious issue for financial regulators?
Nobody is lying
Delta has absolutely misrepresented if not lied about the real cause of these issues in public statement. I always thought publicly traded companies cannot generally publish untrue statements because it can impact the markets and shareholders.
Things happen. It’s a complex world. I flew another airline on Monday and was delayed for other reasons. I’m sticking with Delta, it’s not even a question, and I shared that with Ed this morning.
Ah yes, same ol’, same ol’ when it comes to IT.
Speaking as an IT professional of 25 years, I can 100% believe what the other IT people are saying because it happens where I work. It’s the whole, “Everything is running fine. What are we paying you for?” and, “Everything is failing! What are we paying you for?” conundrum all over again.
The bean counters don’t understand that a solid IT group, in these times, and especially in large businesses, is not only an asset, but a requirement. But because the “American mode of thinking” typically eschews maintenance (be honest – how many people proactively take their vehicles in for routine maintenance and perform routine maintenance on their homes?). So when you pawn off or, worse yet, devalue IT support and have this misguided belief that, “we only need IT to fix stuff”, well, like a car you neglect to do routine maintenance on, or a house you feel that doesn’t need upkeep, it costs you in the end, and let me tell you, we LOVE it when you’re in a hole because YOU. WILL. PAY. ANYTHING. to get out of it.
Yeah, skeleton IT support helps the bottom line…when things are copasetic. When it turns into a [poop]show, the money saved is no longer saved, and it now costs more. I hope the shareholders weren’t banking on a good Q3 because it’s. gonna. suck.
Good job, Delta! Greed loses again!
Given my home airport, routing options, and flight times, Delta is still the best choice for me. Every time I have to fly AA, UA, or WN, it’s always an inferior experience.
How can I be done with Delta? C’mon…next year I get an oh-so-generous 15 Sky Club visits with my Reserve Card!