2024 Delta Air Lines disruption

But Delta, by far the hardest hit of the US major airlines, experienced an operational meltdown that continued through the weekend. The airline cancelled more than 1,200 flights on Friday. Thousands of stranded travelers were forced to spend the night at Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport, Delta's largest hub and the busiest airport in the world by passenger traffic. Metro Atlanta hotels and rental car companies were overwhelmed by the crisis, leaving travelers no option but to stay in the airport. One traveler attempting to return home to Tampa (after giving up on reaching California) reported that Amtrak was charging $1,000 for a one-way train ticket from Atlanta to Tampa. Visibly distraught passengers with nowhere to go were seen trying to sleep in the airport on hard linoleum floors without blankets or food. Without warning, Delta banned unaccompanied minors on its flights through the end of 23 July. This imposed hardship on parents who had been counting on that service to enable their children to fly without the expense of an accompanying adult.

On 20 July, Delta cancelled more than 1,400 flights.

On 21 July, Delta cancelled more than 1,300 flights. With so many passengers still stuck in Hartsfield–Jackson after two consecutive nights, the airport implemented a "concessions crisis plan" and a plan to reunite passengers with their checked baggage. However, passengers in Atlanta continued to report "jam-packed" conditions and "heartbreaking" scenes in the terminals.

On 21 July, Delta CEO Ed Bastian apologised to customers in a statement and revealed that the outage had left one of Delta's crew-tracking software programs "unable to effectively process the unprecedented number of changes triggered by the system shutdown". Delta CIO Rahul Samant said the program had been brought back online around 11 a.m. on 19 July, but was overwhelmed by the backlog of updates awaiting processing and had been trying to catch up ever since. After the ground stop left too many crew members in the wrong places, Delta struggled to assemble enough pilots and flight attendants at airport gates to operate scheduled flights. Many flights were repeatedly delayed and finally cancelled because the one or two crew members who made it to the gate for a particular flight kept hitting their legal flight time limit before the airline could finish fully staffing the flight, and this caused the crisis to snowball as those crew and their aircraft were now in the wrong place for the following day's flights. (A similar phenomenon occurred during the 2022 Southwest Airlines scheduling crisis.) That same day, US Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg said on social media that the US Department of Transportation had received hundreds of complaints about Delta, and reminded the airline of its legal obligations to affected passengers.

On 22 July, Delta cancelled more than 1,200 flights. On 23 July, the Department of Transportation announced the launch of a formal investigation into Delta's treatment of passengers. Delta officials promised to cooperate but said the airline was focused on its recovery. Senator Maria Cantwell, in her capacity as chair of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, wrote to Bastian to express her concern for Delta passengers. On 23 July, Secretary Buttigieg estimated that over 500,000 passengers had been affected by Delta flight cancellations. He told a press conference, "There's a lot of things I'm very concerned about, including people being on hold for hours and hours, trying to get a new flight, people having to sleep on airport floors, even accounts of unaccompanied minors being stranded in airports, unable to get on a flight". He told CBS News: "Stories about people in lines of more than a hundred people with just one customer service agent serving them at an airport, that's completely unacceptable." By then, numerous passengers had ended up in different airports than their baggage because of Delta's flight cancellations, resulting in large piles of unclaimed suitcases and other checked baggage at Delta's airport terminals around the world.

On 25 July, Delta returned to normal flight operations, having cancelled more than 7,000 flights; passengers had filed more than 5,000 complaints about Delta with the Department of Transportation. On 26 July, The Washington Post reported that the department was investigating allegedly misleading communications from Delta that offered only credit towards future Delta flights as compensation for cancelled flights and failed to clearly notify passengers of their legal right to a cash refund.

On 31 July, Delta CEO Ed Bastian said the disruption had cost the airline $500 million, and he said that Delta would sue CrowdStrike to recoup some of its losses.