My reaction on hearing about Delta’s woes, reported here at USA Today:
Delta’s flight woes from a computer glitch carried over into a second day Tuesday, escalating to the point where CEO Ed Bastian issued his second apology in as many days.
“This isn’t the quality of service, the reliability that you’ve come to expect from Delta Air Lines,” Bastian said in a statement posted to the airline’s website at 4 p.m. ET. “We’re very sorry, I’m personally very sorry.â€
Bastian’s apology came as Delta’s schedule was riddled with delays and cancellations for the second day in a row. The airline said it canceled about 530 flights as of 12:30 p.m. ET on Tuesday. Additionally, another 950 flights were delayed at of 4:50 p.m. ET, according to flight-tracking service FlightAware. Combined, that mean close to 1 out of every 4 Delta flights had either been delayed or canceled as of early afternoon. Delta operates about 6,000 flights a day.
Tuesday’s woes follow a Monday that saw Delta cancel 1,000 flights and delay nearly 3,000 others. The carrier’s computer system went down early Monday morning after a power outage at the company’s Atlanta headquarters.
was that I’d really like to see Delta’s business continuity and disaster recovery plan. It looks to me as though it could use some updating.
Delta is a publicly-traded company and as such it’s subject to the requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley. One of the Sarb-Ox requirements is that its top management are obligated to certify that they understand the risks under which the company operates and I don’t see how they could possibly do that without having developed an effective BC-DR plan. They very clearly don’t have one which means they’re out of compliance.
Too bad the Justice Department doesn’t enforce the law any more.
Real life opportunities to test your BC-DR plan don’t come along every day (thankfully). Delta had an opportunity to try out its BC-DR plan and shine. Whoops.
Turns out the problem was a failed automatic transfer switch – when the power cut out, it didn’t transfer the electrical load. I wonder if that specific contingency was in their plan – ATS failures are pretty rare from what I understand.
It also sounds to me as though they were far too dependent on continuing operations in Atlanta. Let’s say, hypothetically, Atlanta is overrun by flesh-eating zombies. Their plan is to shut down all operations forever?
In that case Southwest’s lack of a hub system will be a distinct advantage in reaching a zombie-free zone.
Atlanta is where some clever hacker(s) managed to put “Zombies Ahead” on one of the electronic road signs, so people down there take zombies seriously.
Steve