Delta's woes extend to second day with hundreds more flights canceled

ATLANTA, Aug. 9 (UPI) -- Delta Airline's flight cancellations from a computer glitch extended into a second day Tuesday as the airline attempts to normalize its schedule.

Delta announced it had canceled about 530 flights as of 12:30 p.m. Eastern after it grounded 1,000 flights on Monday. Another 440 flights were delayed, according to flight-tracking service FlightAware.

In its release, the airline noted 1,600 flights departed on Tuesday.

"We were able to bring our systems back on line and resume flights within a few hours yesterday but we are still operating in recovery mode," said Dave Holtz, senior vice president – Operations and Customer Center. "We are sorry for what many of our customers have experienced over the past 24 hours, including those who remain at airports and continue waiting for their flights. We are doing everything we can to return our operation to normal reliability, but we do expect additional delays and cancellations."

Because of the ripple effect after the outage, many of the airline's crews and airplanes were out of place.

Delta advised customers to check the status of their flight at delta.com or the Fly Delta App.

The airline's travel waiver has been extended to customers traveling Tuesday. Passengers whose flights are canceled or delayed more than three hours will get $200 travel vouchers for future flights, Delta said.

But unaccompanied minors that have not yet begun travel will not be accepted until Wednesday.

The outage began around 2:30 a.m. Eastern and all planes were not allowed to depart for several hours.

Delta sent reservations personnel from the corporate headquarters in Atlanta to help customer service agents process passengers at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport., the airline's main hub.

"As I'm sure you can appreciate, it's a all hands on deck effort," American CEO Ed Bastian said on the airline's website.

Delta said the problem was a power outage at its Atlanta hub that affected its computer system, including reservations and ticketing, management of plane movement, gate assignments, air crew scheduling and displays on arrival-departure screens at many airports.