V-Flyer

Various news sources are reporting that all Delta departures are currently suspended due to a "nationwide system outage".

Could make for a fun morning in the LHR Clubhouse.

I think the LHR Clubhouse would be the best place to be.

Fully agree that the best place to sit out the delay will be the LHR Clubhouse!

Remind me though, whose booking engine / IT system are Virgin supposed to be moving onto fairly soon?!

The problems were down to a power outage in Atlanta rather than an IT fault.

Ahem - it is clearly an "IT fault" if you don't have adequate resilience designed & built into your infrastucture, and power & air conditioning are the basic "life blood" of a data centre. Even if you outscource it all to someone else.

Of course, to do that "properly" isn't cheap - redundant power / UPS / generators, & redundant network links to the "outside the data centre world" . But when you experience issues like today, it is no longer a cost, but an "investment" in your business.

As I have said many times to my customers;
Computer systems have three key attributes - good, fast & cheap - pick any two of the three - as a good, fast system will cost what it costs, and won't be as cheap as compromising what you are trying to do.

Fully agree with the above - data centre power & air-con are essential in any resilient IT operation, as is a backup data centre (or centres) that are always on "hot-standby" so you can switch the traffic to them in seconds.

Of course, the more resilience you build in adds to your costs, but it adds reliability which keeps customers happy.

and according to later news reports, Georgia Power are saying "it wasn't us, we had no issues" so it looks like it an "inside the facility" issue. I do hope they learn some lessons from this incident and minimise the chance of a repeat.

thats going to be a lot of compensation cheques

... Or not, assuming most DL passengers are American and many won't even know they qualify for EC261/2004 as there's no US equivalent. Over there you're pretty much at the mercy of the airline when things go wrong.

I haven't written a trip report in ages but I probably will for yesterday's flight (JFK to DEN) in case anyone is interested in the events of being caught up first in the delays from the systems outage and then diverted mid-flight due to engine problems! It was a long long day.

We have already received notice of $200 pp in electronic travel vouchers as we were delayed more than 3 hours and we also received an additional $300pp for the whole emergency landing/unplanned 4 hour stopover in St Louis.