Delta’s debilitating outage goes deeper than a power supply

As the investigation continues into the Delta glitch that grounded flights for hours yesterday, the question is why. How can a major airline just lose all its computers like that?

CBS Transportation Correspondent Kris Van Cleave explains.

“The FBI tells CBS News it does not believe the computer issue that paralyzed Delta Airlines was due to hacking,” he reports. “Instead, the airline blames a power outage in Atlanta overnight.”

Related: Delta outage will require a lot of ‘rejiggering’ to fix

A power outage. The internet wasn’t pleased with that response, nor was Georgia Power, which didn’t like being thrown under the landing gear. The power company noted that Delta was the only customer affected by this so-called outage.

A day after the outage, Delta continued to cancel flights. Senior Vice President Dave Holtz told CNN that the airline is still operating in “recovery mode.” CNN reports the earliest the system will be back to normal will be Wednesday.

You’d think a major airline would have a state-of-the-art backup system.

Well, it turns out the problem goes much deeper than a power supply.

Daniel Baker from airline tracker “Flightaware” says airlines have never fully updated their computer systems.

“So, they’ve got these multi-decade-old systems for dealing with passengers that are suddenly expected to deal with mobile apps and online check-ins on the web — and there’s just a lot more demand for what they’re doing, and they’re doing it with pretty limited capacity,” he said.

The gist of the expert comment on the Delta glitch is that big companies are victims of software fatigue. About my 10-year-old X-P laptop…

— Dave Ross (@thedaveross) August 9, 2016

So, according to him, the problem is that we no longer just present a paper ticket. We download the boarding pass to our smartphone, we sign up for push notifications while we’re ordering snacks and, like the overwhelmed customer service agents yesterday, even a soulless computer finally has all it can stand.

At least it wasn’t a hacker. This time.

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