(RepublicanJournal.org) – On Friday, July 19, the world was impacted by a global outage after cybersecurity company CrowdStrike rolled out a defective update to Microsoft Falcon systems. It affected 8.5 million devices and many industries were impacted, including the healthcare sector, banks, and airlines. Delta was particularly hard hit and had trouble catching up once systems were back online, which led to it canceling more than 5,000 flights. Now, the Biden Administration is investigating.
In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg announced that the Department of Transportation had “opened an investigation … to ensure the airline is following the law and taking care of its passengers.” He had previously spoken with the company, reminding them of their responsibilities to provide refunds in a timely manner and to reimburse passengers for hotel stays and food caused by delays or cancelations.
To put it simply, Delta is having a difficult time recovering from the outage. In addition to the cancelations, it has unclaimed luggage that’s piled up, and passengers are complaining about not receiving refunds — something that Buttigieg reminded the airline it has a responsibility to do.
The company said that one of its tracking tools was seriously affected by the outages, which caused the company to continue struggling, even when other airlines were already back up and running. Over the weekend, it canceled just under 2,600 flights. That trend continued into the beginning of the week. On Monday, the airline canceled nearly 1,200 flights and the next day, it canceled 460. However, by mid-week things seemed to be looking up for the airline.
Following the outage, Delta, along with United Airlines and American Airlines asked the Federal Aviation Administration for a ground stop. That left travelers stranded while CrowdStrike scrambled to fix the error. Many could not get to their destinations in what was one of the busiest travel weekends of the summer.
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