LONDON (AP & WXXI News) Delta Air Lines canceled around 300 flights Monday after its computer systems crashed worldwide, stranding thousands of passengers on a busy travel day.
One of the world's largest airlines said that only 800 of nearly 6,000 scheduled flights were operational.
The flight tracking site FlightStats Inc. said that there were delays on more than 1,000 Delta flights before noon.
About six hours into the outage, limited flights had resumed but widespread delays and cancelations were ongoing.
A power outage at an Atlanta facility at around 2:30 a.m. local time initiated a cascading meltdown, according to the airline, which is also based in Atlanta.
A spokesman for Georgia Power told The Associated Press that the company believes the failure of Delta equipment caused the airline's power outage. He said no other customers lost power.
A Delta spokesman said he had no information on the report.
Many passengers were frustrated that they received no notice of a global disruption, discovering that they were stranded only after making it through security and seeing other passengers sleeping on the floor.
It was unclear if the airline was even able to communicate due to its technical issues, and Delta said that there may be a lag issuing accurate flight status on the company website because of the outage.
Flights that were already in the air when the outage occurred continued to their destinations, but flights on the ground remained there.
Airlines depend on huge, overlapping and complicated technology systems to operate flights, schedule crews and run ticketing, boarding, airport kiosks, websites and mobile phone apps. Even brief outages can snarl traffic and cause long delays.
That has afflicted airlines in the U.S. and abroad. In Rochester, the problem at Delta impacted all six flights that had been scheduled in the morning. One flight was canceled and the other five did depart. You are advised to check ahead with Delta if you plan on flying with them over the next day or so.
Delta is the largest carrier at the Greater Rochester International Airport, with the latest figures showing that about 30 percent of all people flying out of Rochester used Delta.
