Delta Airlines: Global IT meltdown grounds flights worldwide

Some Virgin flights also affected due to code sharing agreement

Delta Airlines has undergone a global IT failure that has grounded flights worldwide.

Delta advised passengers in a tweet:

But several respondents pointed out that this is rather difficult as the Delta app is also down, as is the information feed that sends information about Delta flights to other apps.

Delta Airlines is the third largest airline in the US, carrying 180 million passengers a year, a large number of whom are now standing at terminals asking questions of staff who have no idea what's going on because their systems are down.

One tweeter wrote:

This is the second outage in a month for a major US airline after SouthWest was forced to cancel over 2,000 flights lin July due to a computer glitch.

As Twitter fills with pictures of departure boards and passengers camped out in airport lounges, Delta staff were said to be using a local terminal-based system in some locations, rather than the global cloud-based one that has gone down.

Some Virgin flights have been cancelled as they 'codeshare' with Delta aircraft. Air France and KLM are also said to be affected.

The latest statement blames a power outage at Delta's Atlanta base: "6:55 a.m. ET UPDATE: A power outage in Atlanta, which began at approximately 2:30 a.m. ET, has affected Delta computer systems and operations worldwide, resulting in flight delays. Large-scale cancellations are expected today.

"All flights en route are operating normally. We are aware that flight status systems, including airport screens, are incorrectly showing flights on time. We apologise to customers who are affected by this issue, and our teams are working to resolve the problem as quickly as possible. Updates will be available on Delta News Hub."

UK air traffic control suffered a major IT glitch in October that trapped passengers in Scottish airspace.