IT failure grounds Delta flights worldwide

Tweeting their annoyance

At London’s Heathrow Airport, passengers took to social media to complain of hour-long wait times at the check-in desks.

A Heathrow spokesperson said: “Delta flights from Heathrow are experiencing delays due to the worldwide technical issue with their computer systems. Check-in is currently operating using a backup system, and airport staff are on hand to assist any passengers that are impacted by the delays. Passengers should check with the airline for updates on their flights.”

Delta disclosed no further information about the extent of the IT outage. At the time of writing it said it had cancelled 300 out of 6,000 scheduled flights, and hoped to operate 800 more.

Network problems persist

Delta’s IT failure comes hot on the heels of a similar outage affecting US low-cost carrier Southwest Airlines, which cancelled over 1,000 flights on 20 and 21 July after a networking hardware failure that also hit its backup and disaster recovery systems.

Southwest CEO Gary Kelly, who has since faced calls to resign, said the Dallas-based airline lost between $5m and $10m in revenue due to the outage.

Last year, Delta competitors American Airlines and United Airlines suffered system outages of their own. In American Airlines’ case, the disruption, which centred on its Chicago, Dallas/Fort Worth and Miami hubs, was blamed on “connectivity issues”, while United also pointed the finger at a faulty router.

Growing disruption?

This litany of failures has prompted some aviation industry watchers to speculate that as airlines invest more and more in IT systems designed to make life easier for passengers, the risk of such disruptive outages increases.

However, aviation journalist John Walton of Runway Girl Network said this was not necessarily his impression.

Walton said: “The aviation industry has always had the problem of bespoke legacy systems integrating poorly with wider industry technologies, the specifications for which are often set by a rather unholy combination of a UN body (ICAO) and an airline trade group (IATA).

“But with a round of airline mergers in the last decade, any one incident becomes much more high profile. Where this might not be global news for a smaller airline 15 or 20 ago, the combined size of airlines like Delta, American, United and Southwest in the US or the increasingly integrated Air France-KLM, IAG (BA-Iberia-Aer Lingus-Vueling) and Lufthansa (Swiss-Austrian-Eurowings-Brussels) means that a failure affects more flights and more passengers.”

Walton added: “There are questions to be asked, however, about the type of IT issues that are not restricted to aviation – like the power cut that seems to have caused today’s chaos.”

He also made the point that it was scarely credible that “a power failure in one location can take out a global airline with 13 hub airports spanning the globe. It may well be that the global supercarriers need to improve their IT resilience and multi-location fallback systems to prevent this sort of thing in the future.”