Honestly...kind of expected Delta would arrange a room for you and provided ground transportation in this situation. Delta's ST partners (AF, KE, MU, KL) all do this on overnight delays. Heck, KL did take care of Delta pax today at AMS and provided hotels for them.

Here ya go.

http://news.delta.com/delta-offers-c...temwide-outage

It really isn't much to be honest.

In MCO, 3.5 hr delay. Was going to FWA via DTW. Gave up on the connection. Removed the DTW-FWA, FWA-DTW segments. I will drive, when I finally get to DTW. Luckily, it looks like I leave at 7. There is a flight going 11:30 PM , arriving 2 AM into DTW.:rolleyes:

SC is a zoo. I moved to the Club @ MCO. Much quieter and better beer on the house.

1MMer and former plat who flew Frontier feels a bit of schadenfreude
 

Word. I posted this on another thread but I s'pose it has some relevance here as well. This all happened today (8/8, the 42nd anniversary of Nixon resigning, I believe ;)):

OK, so I'm heading on the rental car shuttle at RDU to fly back to ATL on FRONTIER and a guy tells the driver his airline is Delta and a woman who looks a bit like a younger Oprah says, "Ooooh, didn't you hear? They had a massive outage and their flights are delayed all over the place."

The guy was kinda surprised he hadn't been called or anything, but he gets on his smartphone and finds his flight with a posted delay of just an hour or so, which he hope holds.

I get to the terminal and see the line at the ticket counter, which looks about 200 deep and like a disastrous TSA line. The Skiority one is maybe 30 deep. But this is only RDU, a relatively minor airport for them in the overall scheme of things. I look at the big board, though, and it's full of DL delays and a cancellation or two.

As "luck" would have it, one of the DL gates was right next to my Frontier gate. Looked like a line of about 50 or so there. The gate agent on the loudspeaker was trying to hand out red cards and get people to rebook for the next day or request a refund, but people were still holding out hope it wouldn't be that long. I wasn't hearing anything about hotels or anything like that. They were only encouraging those with ATL as a final destination to play the waiting game to try to get on something that day, as it could be that the connection was stuck and they'd just have to wait in ATL rather than RDU in that case.

Oh, and don't try calling the 800 number. You'll just get a busy signal.

The gate agent apologized, said she knew it was stressful, said the problem was systemwide, and that she'd been at the airport since 3:30 a.m. (It was around 12:30 p.m. by then).

It looked like a worse problem than might be indicated by that guy's hour delay, so I decided that that was just the opening bid and they were doing that time-honored airline tradition of dribbling out the bad news in little bites.

My plane with Frontier ($38 RT from ATL!) was on time. I got on as zone 1 (as a relatively new elite) for my window seat in one of the "stretch" seats up front with the free carry-on bag...more or less the standard treatment for legacies. The middle seat was unoccupied. The plane as a whole was at maybe 85%. Delta mustn't have an interline agreement, because many of their distressed pax were headed to ATL and they could have easily filled that plane. I dunno what Frontier wanted on the walk-up, but there may have been one or two that just paid it out-of-pocket.

It was a delightful flight, with the red fox on the tail, a couple of excited young children in the row behind me for whom it was their first flight ever (and their mom) and it even arrived slightly early. I got to walk by a bunch of Delta gates in D concourse and it looked like posted delays at 4 hours after schedule were about par for the course. Subject to change, though. ;)

As a former plat who's taken only one paid DL flight since they shifted to the revenue model, I have to admit to a small, small, tiny bit of schadenfreude over the whole thing, not for the poor pax (who at least in RDU were taking it well) but for the airline. Even realizing that Frontier is probably 5 times as hackable and can't get its website to function as intended in some browsers under NORMAL circumstances. And would likely be terrible in irregular operations, though probably not *quite* as bad as Spirit (F9 might get you a can of Sprite while you sleep on the floor).

Oh, and F9 still has the distance-based miles. Got 1,000 where the same ticket on DL would have earned 190 (Oh, wait, more like 45 if you don't earn miles on the part paid for taxes). A thousand vs. 45...no wonder the rental cars have been earning the most legacy miles for me lately.

BTW, this should be a wake-up call in that a failure like this at any of the 3 legacies (power outage, Russian hackers, disgruntled employee sabotage or any other possibility) can't or won't be absorbed by the rest of the system. It reminds me of the UPS strike of years ago where the USPS and FedEx didn't have capacity to pick up the slack.

Thanks to these MERGERS and having just three major airlines that aren't trying as hard to compete as they used to, the pax get treated worse, the FF programs have been greatly devalued for the vast majority of pax, and if any one goes down then the rest of the system might not be able to help out that much - or at least there's not a good backup plan.

I do hope that guy doesn't have to stay in the airport overnight. Wasn't his fault.

Yep, it would have been nice. But I think there's only a few really close to NRT and the rest are far away. And the ground transport seemed to stop early too.

Will be interesting to see the passenger compensation on this fiasco. I don't think 10K SkyMiles will be enough this time

Stingy! I bet they are hoping no one will claim their EUR 600 compensation

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...

Widgets, if you see me, can you please do the honor of treating me as an S1A on any of your upcoming flights this week? It would be quite appreciated ;)

I don't even know my schedule this week tbh. If you find me, the password for standby list shenanigans will be "the list is dark and full of terrors." May the odds be ever in your favor.

Yeah, I've been mildly amused by the amount of forthright "this would never happen to me" stated or implied. It does seem likely they or their providers/vendors had large gaps in their continuity plan. But the defects are always easy to identify and pick apart in hindsight, and every business makes tradeoffs.

Sure, this is still a process failure on DL's part, and embarrassing for them, but I do have some degree of sympathy for how it could have happened.

Per NY Times

A spokesman for Georgia Power, John Kraft, said the shutdown was caused when a piece of electrical equipment called a switchgear broke down. The power cutoff did not affect other parts of Atlanta.

“We believe that Delta Air Lines experienced an equipment failure overnight that caused their outage,” he said. “Our Georgia Power crews have been on site this morning. We’re working closely with the team at Delta as they repair that equipment.”

Good luck to everyone affected.

Wouldn't that require the computers to be working? ;)

My Compass flight later tonight just landed at OKC 3 minutes early and is expected to take off for MSP a minute early. I guess I should be thankful not to be flying mainline this week.

It's a bit unsettling to know there are vulnerabilities that could lead to the entire system basically shutting down like that, as you have to worry not only about accidents but also malice. Isn't the idea with redundancy to have data stored in several places geographically so that something like a fire or power outage in one place can't take the whole thing down? I dunno how realistic a proposition that is for an airline, but you hear about it for large Web-based businesses. Bastian should have some 'splainin' to do to investors over why there's no back-up plan.

Well that 100% flight completion is going out the window this month! :D