It is pure speculation that it is a cyber attack, but if it is (and it's the PRC), from a warfare standpoint, they really won't give much weight to their airlines' business. If true, it would be about testing smaller attacks on critical infrastructure to see if they could do it should open conflict break out. That would be way more important than anything to do with PRC airlines.

The US infrastructure is poorly secured. While the current administration seems to be finally doing something about it, in some ways, to quote a previous president, there is a "window of vulnerability" until the US can secure critical infrastructure.

I was told the old NW data center was sold off to the Minnesota Vikings and that's where they are having training camp. Shame they didn't keep it as a secondary.

Well, I finally arrived home 27 hours after my scheduled arrival and $400 in hotel and uber bills. I will say, though, that DL employees (despite being exhausted and frustrated themselves) were all kind and helpful in ATL. As bad as I felt for myself, I did feel bad for them.

Looking like there are going to be a lot more cancellations than was projected in the operations update from DL last night at 11pm... "The outlook for Wednesday’s operation is positive, Delta officials said, with about 90 cancellations expected at the beginning of the day leading to normal operations later."

Going to easily double that number it seems.

Seems like a bad idea for them to attack DL, damn near what it feels like half of Sky Team is PRC based airlines. :)

Maybe this was a planned revolt against those PRC airlines realizing the mistake of joining Sky Team. :D

Thank goodness. I still believe that most people aren't complete jackholes.

Hope things start settling down for you guys soon, and not only because that means things will have been getting back to normal. ^

Second day trying to get from HSV to AUS via ATL and flights still a mess. Early morning flight from HSV to ATL looked good. Plane and pilots were at gate, but someone forgot to schedule any flight attendants. Connecting flight to AUS was still a maybe up until about the time the HSV GA announced that the HSV to ATL flight was canceled due to no flight attendants. I could not make the connecting flight to AUS and all of the rest of the flights for today and tomorrow are way overbooked and were still showing status uncertain. I just gave up and decided it was not my week to go to Austin. HSV ticket counter could not issue full ticket refund but did note that it is eligible. I have to call Delta for the refund. I think I will wait for a few days before trying that.

Probably fell back to DLTerm instead of SNAP, so that requires a lot of typing but can be more powerful for overriding and rebooking since from what I understand the graphical SNAP interface doesn't have full functionality yet. That was eluded to in one of DL's statements that mentioned reverting to the originally designed interface.

Feels like DL is doing the car rental version of this the last few days :P

Very funny!

I think Americans tend to view things mostly economically, while in many countries in the world economics is only part of their decision making. For some countries, warfare (even asymmetrical) will be far more important than economic considerations.

Correct.

Delta has tried to get just about everyone to use SNAP instead of DLTerm/Deltamatic. Upside is easier to use - training/onboarding is a 'couple of weeks' instead of '6-9 months', also, training can be performed by/delegated to airport staff instead of central/classroom onboarding. However, as we saw this week, there is the 'handicap/paralysis effect' when poop hits the fan.

They're also using Amadeus for joint reservations... which is tricky.

Working in cybersecurity, do I think it's possible? Absolutely.

Is Delta's explanation fishy (power outage)? Also true.

But one has to question what type of system we're talking about here. Are they using Windows/Intel machines for power switching?

"Old, reliable technology" = "mainframe" = "difficult to bring down". It's like ICS (industrial control systems) and the whole thread on the energy grid - absolutely possible to take down, but difficult (Stuxnet is an outlier).

Yeah, sounds like 90 is an understatement. I'm already seeing 12 flights cancelled so far today out of MSP alone.

Can I ask you guys something? How are you going to handle compensation? I did receive the email about the $200 voucher, but I must say that it is not much in light of the 27 hour delay I had. Our baggage went ahead of us so we were also without that. Couldn't wait in 300-person line for hotel voucher (SCs were closed by midnight when our flight was canceled) so found a hotel (11 miles away) myself. Everything near airport was completely sold out, as you can imagine. DL phone lines were completely jammed. I'm out the hotel, uber, a few meals, and a lot of time. Plus it was a huge aggravation. And my total travel time, which should have been 12 hours ended up being 39 hours. Complete with jetlag, no sleep for 24 hours, and my son with me, etc. That last leg was after 6 weeks of intense European travel and we really wanted to be home.

I have some trip insurance, on which I can file a claim for some of those expenses. But I confess that the $200 voucher email, while proactive, doesn't really appease me. Thankfully I did not miss anything truly important (and I really am grateful for that b/c I know some folks did) and ultimately may have to suck this up. But I did hear about folks getting better compensation (in one case to the tune of $1k/person).

What will the rest of you request? I thought I would request reimbursements for whatever insurance doesn't cover and a refund of the points (30k/p) used for the one-way ticket that took 39 hours rather than 12 to complete.

http://news.delta.com/what-delta-cus...know-wednesday