DOT investigates ongoing disruptions at Delta following CrowdStrike IT outage

July 23 (UPI) – The U.S. Department of Transportation announced Tuesday that it is launching an investigation into flight disruptions at Delta Air Lines after the airline was forced to cancel a significant number of flights in the U.S. since Friday due to a global IT outage.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said the goal of the investigation was to “ensure the airline is complying with the law and taking care of its passengers during the ongoing widespread disruptions,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg posted on X.

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“All passengers have the right to fair treatment and I will ensure that this right is upheld,” he said.

Delta said on Tuesday that it was cooperating with the investigation.

“We remain fully focused on restoring our operations after cybersecurity vendor CrowdStrike’s faulty Windows update left IT systems around the world inoperable,” the company said in a statement to ABC News and The Hill.

Teams across Delta operations “are working tirelessly to care for and accommodate customers impacted by delays and cancellations as we work to restore the reliable, on-time service they expect from Delta,” the statement said.

The outages came after US cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said a “significant number” of 8.5 million Windows devices – 1 percent of the global total – had crashed due to a faulty software update, leading to thousands of canceled flights since Friday.

The majority of the problems affected passengers booked on Delta flights. More than half of Delta’s IT systems worldwide are Windows-based, and IT teams had to manually repair and restart each of the affected systems, the airline said Monday.

As of Tuesday morning, the airline had canceled more than 400 flights, more than any other major airline; the second highest number of canceled flights was 55.

On Friday, CrowdStrike immediately stated that the mass outage – caused by a faulty content update for the Falcon driver software – had impacted air traffic, hospitals, financial systems and other government facilities around the world, including emergency services.

By Monday, FlightAware had reported 2,016 cancellations to and from the United States, and 9,382 delays during the day. But days after the mass outage of systems with Windows devices, most of them, including airlines, returned to normal operations – with the exception of Delta Air Lines.

Cancellations affected 32% of flights on Friday and 24% on Monday. The airline said the problem occurred “on the busiest travel weekend of the summer” when capacity exceeded 90%.

Endeavor Air, Delta’s regional subsidiary, was also affected: 102 flights (14% of the total) were canceled on Monday, after 293 flights on Friday (42%), 221 on Saturday (44%) and 151 on Sunday (23.5%).

The Transportation Department advises Delta customers to first address current issues directly with the airline, Buttigieg said, but added that the department wants to hear from passengers “who believe Delta has failed to comply with government-mandated passenger protection requirements during the recent period of travel disruptions.”

“We will continue,” Buttigieg said.