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Delta CEO sees flight disruptions lasting for another couple of days

July 22, 2024 43:22 PM PDT

CEO Ed Bastian on Monday said it will take the U.S. carrier another couple of days before its operations recover from a global cyber outage that snarled flights around the world.
The Atlanta-based carrier has been hit hard by the outage. It has canceled over 4,000 flights since Friday, stranding thousands of customers across the country. By contrast, disruptions at other major U.S. carriers had largely subsided.
On Monday, Delta had canceled over 800 flights, or about 21% of the scheduled total as of 3:30 p.m. EST, according to data from FlightAware. It accounted for about half of total flight cancellations.
In a video message to employees on Monday, Bastian and Chief information officer Rahul Samant provided an update on the situation.
Bastian said the company is working around the clock to get its operation back on track, but it will take another couple of days before the worst is over.
"Today will be a better day than yesterday and hopefully Tuesday and Wednesday will be that much better again," he said.
The company's shares closed down about 3.5% at $43.83.
About 60% of most critical applications that Delta uses are Microsoft Windows based, and were rendered inoperable early on Friday following CrowdStrike's faulty Windows update, the airline said.
Delta's IT teams required to manually repair and reboot each of the affected systems, with additional time needed for applications to synchronize and start communicating with each other.
But its crew tracker application - which ensures all flights have a full crew in the right place at the right time - is requiring the most time and manual support to synchronize, Delta said.
"Everything except that critical system is up and running," Samant said. "And that is what we're working on feverishly."