As yet another IT person, I've enjoyed reading the conjecture in this thread, especially from a couple of seemingly particularly well-informed posters. The posts I enjoy most, however, (excluding "how can I scam something out of this?") are the ones from posters asserting that in their IT world nothing like this could ever happen. HA, BC, and DR are, like security, about risk reduction not risk elimination. No matter how impressive your system redundancy is, I can find a way (however unlikely) to defeat it.

Should someone get fired for this outage? Maybe, or maybe that person already quit years ago, or maybe that consulting firm finished the contract and left, or maybe it was a fluke.

The most enlightening posts might be those from MSP_Dave, which if true suggest DL may over time be heading the way of UA under SMI/J, and that it may be time to start thinking about a new primary airline...