Delta Air Lines: Lessons to be Learned After IT Outage

Airlines were some of the most affected by the global IT outage - a situation which has led the US Department of Transportation to start an investigation into Delta Air Lines’ operations. 

Delta in total has faced nearly 7,000 flight cancellations and more than 176,000 refund of reimbursement requests from its customers.

This is significant for Delta as a widely respected airline in the US. The company has continually been hailed for its reliable operational services, with its on-time performance cementing its leading position as a premium airline.

The airline also continually updates its services to suit demand, having improved its crew tracking team over the years so as to not overload flights. With this in mind, Technology Magazine considers some of the ways in which Delta harnesses technology to improve customer experience.

Prioritising customer experience

Delta harnesses the power of technology in myriad ways with the aim of providing excellent service for its customers. Namely, the introduction of its Delta Digital ID was designed to offer a more efficient and hands-free way to navigate an airport.

The Digital ID works by allowing customers to check bags and move through airport security without the need to show a paper boarding pass or physical government ID. Expanded in late 2023, the service now covers more airports across the US so it can grow as a time-saving, industry-first technology.

Also in 2023, Delta confirmed it was starting to use AI to improve efficiencies for reservations agents and also to assist in pricing. Speaking with Forbes at the time, Ed Bastian highlighted the importance of Delta, along with other companies, ensuring that stringent policies are in place to handle AI.

“Without clean data, you let the computers control the information flow with a dirty structure,” he commented. “We're being very disciplined about how we roll it out, but I think the opportunity is enormous.”

The company has also been leveraging AWS technology since 2022. As the airline’s preferred cloud provider, AWS helps Delta unlock technology and cloud opportunities, in addition to streamlining processes that aim to make the customer experience faster and more secure.

Speaking at the time Delta’s EVP and Chief Information Officer, Rahul Samant, said: “Our work with AWS is one of many critical steps we’re taking to modernise our technology platform, empower our employees with the best tools available, and give customers even more control over the way they fly.”

Now, Delta leverages Amazon Bedrock to build generative AI (Gen AI) applications. The airline has built a new customer service tool that answers passenger questions in a more conversational style.

Actively engaged with technology, failed by the system

Delta has been one of slowest among major US carrier companies to recover following the failed CrowdStrike update on Windows computers. 

The airline relies on both Microsoft and CrowdStrike’s technology services and has apologised to customers as it struggled to resume normal operations. Whilst other airlines recovered quickly, the airline continued to cancel hundreds of flights each day, revealing continued problems with its crew scheduling system.

On the day of the incident, the leading airline faced more than 2,200 flight cancellations, with subsequent disruption and cancellations in the days after. According to company CEO Ed Bastian, Delta faced huge monetary losses as a result.

“It cost us about US$500m in five days,” he said in an interview with CNBC. “This was lost revenue as well as the tens of millions of dollars per day in compensation and hotels for the five-day period.

“We did everything we could to take care of our customers over that time frame.”

The incident came very shortly after Delta reported an adjusted revenue of US$15.4bn in its June quarterly results, an increase of 5.4% from 2023. CNBC also reported that Delta would be seeking compensation from both Microsoft and CrowdStrike as a result of the outage. 

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