Traditionally on the busiest week of the year, Delta Air Lines had been struck down by a system failure that had brought the airline to a standstill yesterday morning with very few flights operating.

Some 3,200 flights were scheduled to be operated yesterday by Delta with 510,000 seats provided. With demand at its absolute peak, somewhere in the region of 450,000 passengers have been affected by the power outage. At Atlanta airport alone, Delta was scheduled to operate over 125,000 seats during the day as our chart above identifies the top ten affected airports on its network.

With Delta also a very heavy carrier of connecting traffic then lots of connections will naturally be missed leaving passengers stranded far from home with few alternate means of reaching their destinations. And whilst Delta have waived all cancellation and rebooking fees in the height of summer, that is small comfort for those concerned.

We anticipate recovery from the disruption will take a few days; both crews and aircraft will be out of place and that inevitably takes some time before a full operating programme can be restored. Naturally, if you are caught by this unfortunate event then the best course of action at such times is to contact the airline directly and we would suggest doing so before travelling to the airport.

Equally, using flight status services will give you as much insight as is currently available.

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