Delta expects more cancellations on slow recovery from CrowdStrike outage

By Mary Schlangenstein | Bloomberg

Delta Air Lines Inc. expects to cancel more flights this week as the carrier slowly recovers from a crippling technology outage, a company spokesman said.

The airline canceled more than 800 flights on Monday, more than half of those grounded across the US industry, as the carrier worked for a fourth day to re-establish a system linking pilots and flight attendants to aircraft, stranding frustrated travelers during the year’s busiest travel season.

Delta’s shares fell 2.6% as of 2:56 p.m. in New York.

The cancellations, involving 21% of the Atlanta-based airlines’s scheduled flights, lingered into a fourth day as rival carriers American Airlines Group Inc., United Airlines Holdings Inc. and Southwest Airlines Co. parked a combined 72 planes as of mid-afternoon New York time, according to flight-tracking website FlightAware.

Delta’s performance caught the attention of US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who warned the airline about fully compensating effected passengers, and prompted an apology Sunday from Delta Chief Executive Officer Ed Bastian. The problems began Friday with an outage caused by CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. that affected a “significant number” of Delta functions that rely on Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating system,  rendering the airline unable to process large volumes of changes to flights and their crews.

The lingering problems brought back memories of Southwest’s December 2022 meltdown during a winter storm that overwhelmed its crew-scheduling system and forced the airline to scrap more than 16,700 flights over 10 days.