Delta resumes operations after glitch grounds flights

Delta Air Lines (DAL) has suffered a disruption in its domestic flights for over an hour as its computer systems experienced a technical glitch on the networks. There remained no diversions or cancellations due to the issue and the company has restored all the systems.

The company said its operations remained unaffected outside the US due to the issue. The glitch occurred on Tuesday evening and turned serious as all of the domestic departures were halted across US airports.

Delta was able to rectify the issue within an hour and permission was given for flights to take off from most of the airports. However, airports such as JFK and LaGuardia in New York and Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta continued to experience the issue, and the flights remained grounded for more than an hour.

The carrier has suggested fliers to check with the flight status on the Fly Delta app and website before departing to the airport. During the issue timeframe, the website and app too were impacted that prevented users to log-in for flight status check, but Delta has resumed the website and app services. The safety remained unaffected; the company said when fixing the glitch.

This is not the first time Delta experienced a technical glitch. An outage of its systems forced Delta to cancel flights in 2017 and flights were canceled and grounded in 2016 due to a computer crash at its Atlanta, Georgia hub.

During early September, Delta reported its operating performance for the month August. The company’s traffic rose by 3.6%, and its capacity increased by 3.5%. Passenger load factor inched up 0.1 points to 88% from 87.9% last year. The company had lagged behind in the mainline on-time performance that fell by 4.1 percentage points. The passengers boarded had risen by 4%, and the cargo ton miles has moved up 1.4% for August.