Delta Air Lines is now facing a federal investigation as it has continued to cancel flights for the fifth day running after the global CrowdStrike outage hit the airline industry. While many other companies seem to have regained stable footing after a faulty update crashed 8.5 million Windows PCs, Delta continues to struggle.
According to a report on CBS, the airline has scrapped 478 flights as of 7.30pm ET on July 23rd and delayed a further 1,440. This has led to the U.S. Department of Transportation's Office of Aviation Consumer Protection issuing a notice of an official investigation. A statement provided to CBS from the Transport Department said it would be "investigating Delta Air Lines following continued widespread flight disruptions and reports of concerning customer service failures."
The cancellations from Delta are far more than other U.S. airline and some travelers have opted to pay for costly tickets with other operators just to get to their destination faster.
A statement from Delta CEO Ed Bastian on Monday, July 22 explained it would take "another couple of days" for the airline to truly recover from the impact of the outage. Delta has extended the travel waiver for customers it put in place after the incident and customers can also seek a refund for their unflown trip here.
"The issue impacted the Microsoft Windows operating system. Delta has a significant number of applications that use that system, and in particular one of our crew tracking-related tools was affected and unable to effectively process the unprecedented number of changes triggered by the system shutdown," Bastian wrote.
Fixes for machines affected by the faulty update have been coming through in the days since the outage, but many businesses are still counting the cost of the chaos. That's because, in a lot of scenarios, the fixes need to be directly implemented by a human IT technician. Companies like Delta, with multiple different parts of the business affected, are facing an uphill struggle and countless man hours to get everything working again.
Delta isn't the only one facing official oversight. Yesterday it emerged that CrowdStrike CEO and co-founder George Kurtz has also been asked to testify in front of the House Homeland Security Committee.
