Post #1886271

2024-08-02 22:54 UTC

Took a while to write this, but I was flying on Delta almost two weeks ago—on the Saturday when the CrowdStrike bug hit. We were flying on a family vacation. Our departure was scheduled for the afternoon. The TSA lines looked long, but nowhere close to a bad day. The lines for the customer service desks stretched through the airport. Delta had made an effort to bring all their employees in. There were a lot of employees in vests, and most of them were busy. Customers with problems still vastly outnumbered the airline staff. Once we got past security, we saw the LONG lines. Customers lined up from the customer service desk until the end of the concourse. It might have been as massive of mess as I’ve seen. Screens all over the airport had error messages. Our flight had a standby list of about 150 passengers, which was a fair fraction of the plane’s capacity. The flight was almost completely sold beforehand, so all the standby passengers were competing for only a few seats. The gate area was overflowing. Huge numbers of passengers were lined up to ask where they were in the pecking order. The public monitors had blue screens. The gate agents announced to all the passengers that, if they had a seat assigned, they’d be on the flight. If they had a seat request, then it was a long shot and to expect to be flying on Monday or Tuesday. The flight was delayed—first by a late arrival, then waiting on a member of the flight crew, then because they needed a motor to start an engine. All in all, delayed for about two hours, and we were lucky. A hundred or so had to wait on another flight. Some passengers tried to get into the Sky Club—that had been over capacity for hours, and usually turns people away on a good day. The gate staff and the flight staff and the other passengers were tired, but decent people, and acted kind.

Replies (1)

@sluggard@infosec.exchange 2024-08-02 23:37

Doh! It was Friday we flew out! That was the first day. The next day, my son in college was flying out. He had a seat assigned. His aircraft had been parked at the airport the night before. Reportedly, the airport was less chaotic. We found out about his flight delay about five minutes before he did. He was delayed about an hour. Then, we found out about his flight cancellation about five or ten minutes before he did. He had to get into a massive line to rebook. The mobile app offered to help him rebook his flight, but that kept erroring and not showing any alternative flights. I called him. At the time, I didn’t think this was the worst airline IT fiasco. Now, it looks like one of the worst, if not the worst—espresso for Delta. The mobile app wasn’t effective. He couldn’t talk to their call center—hold times were hours. Texting didn’t work. He doesn’t have a Xitter account, and I don’t think that would have helped. Chat support was down. I went to the website, and worked to rebook his Saturday flight. There was nothing for Saturday or Sunday. Other airlines, like Southwest, were sold out on Sunday. The rebooking pages look like HTML from 1998. I rescheduled for Monday, and was redirected to the home page—it turns out, the seat was probably acquired by someone else, and there was no error message. I rescheduled again—same mystery behavior again. Finally, I got confirmation on a Tuesday flight. It was clear that this part of the operation hadn’t gotten attention in years. My son got a ride from the airport with a friend I’d never had to go this far down the website to do anything with Delta. We had a great trip—my son’s was shorter than planned—but a lot of less tech-savvy people who travel less probably ended up in worse shape

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