Originally Posted by SEA_Tigger
Maybe at the time the agents didn't know.
I have seen the UA displays the agents have for where an aircraft is (a six hour weather delay in GSO hoping my connection to SEA would still be at ORD or if I was better off just catching a room at GSO and trying in the morning) and all it said was where the plane was, not why it was there.
There are different displays and at least one of them does give the reason. It gets murky when the reason is "late equipment"-- some agents will bother to find out whether that aircraft is late due to weather at a previous stop, in which case they can treat it as a weather delay with no compensation & no offline protection.