UPDATE 09:40 P.M. ET – Delta flights are back in the air.
Delta teams have restored all IT systems after a technology issue briefly affected some systems this evening. Delta employees are now working diligently to accommodate customers whose travel plans have been affected. Booking, check-in and flight status are now available on delta.com. The Fly Delta app is also now functional. Customers should check flight information on delta.com or on the Fly Delta app for the latest operational information affecting their flights.
During the technology issue, Delta issued a mainline groundstop in the U.S. until systems could be brought back up. There was no disruption or safety impact on any Delta flights in the air.
We apologize to all customers for this inconvenience.
Delta systems are back online after an outage earlier this evening that led to a ground stop of approximately one hour. All domestic flights across the USA were temporarily delayed, though the ground stop did not effect flights already in the air.
During the outage, Delta stated:
Delta IT teams are working diligently to address a technology issue impacting some of our systems. We have issued a Delta groundstop as we work to bring systems back up as quickly as possible. We apologize to all customers for this inconvenience.
How Does Something Like This Happen?
The good news is that the ground stop has been lifted. The more troubling question, however, is what happened in the first place? Reservations systems were down. Check-in systems were down. The fly Delta app crashed. Put simply, everything shut down for nearly an hour.
CONCLUSION
If Delta reveals what the source of the issue was, I’ll post a follow-up. In the meantime, hopefully if you are traveling on Delta tonight you’ll soon be in the air.
image: Delta
Someone tripped on a cable in their data center.
Had to be China Southern hackers giving the middle finger to Delta before they defect to OneWorld.
Their decision to use ATC is an interesting one. They claim that airborne flights were unaffected but if that was truly the case then why the need to have ATC impose a ground stop?
My suspicion is that the outage was so total that they lost operational control of the fleet. The airborne flights ate certainly capable of managing their aircraft without communications with system ops (we do it all the time) but the FAR’s mandate that Delta have that ability and the ability to excercise operational control of the fleet. It’s a subject the FAA takes very seriously.
Consequently if that was lost getting ATC to groundstop all mainline flights (which would capture those off the gate and taxiing for departure) is the quickest way to ensure no additional flights get airborne until the required systems are back online. It’s the sort of failure which really should not happen as their should be redundant backups in place to prevent it. That Delta could suffer such a failure after the ones they’ve had perviously points either to a failure to learn and plan properly or a new and totally unanticipated failure mode.
@Kevin your China Southern comment triggered me lol… I have had to deal with China Southern Cargo (different, I know) losing pallets full of products. Entire pallets just nowhere to be found and the mouth-breathers on both ends just make things worse. I went to their warehouse at LAX (which is shared with other airlines *eye roll*) and poorly-marked boxes were stacked 10-15 high, and scattered across a warehouse that must have been at least 500,000 square feet. Bunch of morons.
Sorry, this whole thing was all my fault. I tried running a multi-segment international award search from the website and the whole system came crashing down.