Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Transportation made a big change to how airlines had to issue refunds in the event of a canceled flight. Previously, airlines could make due with a voucher for a future flight; heneforth, they’d need to issue those refunds in the form of cash. In the wake of the CrowdStrike outage this month, Delta was place in the unenviable position of having to cancel a large number of flights. And in the wake of those cancellations, the Department of Transportation is now investigating whether Delta did right by its customers.
As Ian Duncan at The Washington Post reports, the investigation centers around text messages Delta sent to passengers about cancelled flights, which may not have notified travelers of their rights to a refund. According to an anonymous source, regulators learned last week that some text messages from Delta told affected travelers that they would be reimbursed for cancelled flights via a credit for future travel. Delta, in turn, announced that it was cooperating with the investigation.
The Post also reports that Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg raised the issue in a phone conversation with Delta CEO Ed Bastian. This issue affected a considerable number of travelers — as Duncan writes, roughly 5,000 flights had to be cancelled as a result of the CrowdStrike outage.
Delta Is Adding a Bar to Some Regional Flights
It harks back to an earlier era of flyingThe effects of the CrowdStrike outage were felt by companies across a number of industries, but the effects on Delta were especially severe. As experts told ABC News this week, Delta was hit hard due to the sheer number of computers they had running Windows and the time and attention it took to make individual updates. This latest development is one more unsettling twist in a prolonged headache for the airline.
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