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The issue affected only Delta, not other airlines at the Michigan airport
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Delta says flights at Detroit Metro Airport’s McNamara Terminal are resuming Friday after an early-morning “tech connectivity issue” caused chaos, including halted check-ins and unhappy travelers.
“Delta has issued a waiver to provide flexibility for customers traveling to, from or through DTW on Dec. 5 and 6,” a Delta spokesperson told The Independent in a statement. “We apologize for the inconvenience to our customers and thank them for their patience as Delta teams work to safely return to normal operations.”
Long lines were seen snaking through the terminal, and early morning travelers reported waiting hours after thousands of people were stranded. The Detroit airport is Delta’s second-largest hub in the U.S., with more than 300 departures every day.
During the outage, the FAA said Delta flights were delayed an average of 2 hours and 40 minutes, according to ClickOnDetroit. The FAA announced at 10:40 a.m. that the average delay was 18 minutes.
Early Friday morning, a widespread outage at web infrastructure services, Cloudflare, affected much of the web, including major sites like X, Substack and Canva.
Cloudflare and Delta did not respond to requests for comment from The Independent on whether they were caught up in the outage.
However, Cloudflare’s website states that scheduled maintenance was to take place at the Detroit Metro Airport between 3 a.m. and 11 a.m. E.T. Friday.
“Traffic might be re-routed from this location, hence there is a possibility of a slight increase in latency during this maintenance window for end-users in the affected region,” the Status section of Cloudflare’s website reads.
Delta issued a waiver for affected Detroit airport travelers on Friday and Saturday, allowing penalty-free rebooking before December 9, with one condition.
“A fare difference may apply when the waiver is class-to-class restrictive, and the original booking class is not maintained in the rebooked itinerary,” the airline said.
Impacted travelers who would prefer to cancel their flights can receive flight credit valid for one year for unused tickets.
Detroit Metro Airport said the issue was limited to Delta and did not affect any other airlines.
Travelers are still encouraged to keep checking their flight status on the Fly Delta app or Delta.com, where they can also update their travel plans.
Around 8:20 a.m. E.T., the Wayne County Airport Authority team said it was in the McNamara Terminal, handing out concession vouchers to affected passengers.
“We’re committed to supporting our customers during this time,” airport officials said on Facebook.
However, some travelers were not impressed by this effort.
“Nobody has come by for those of us at the front of the line that have been waiting 3+ hours,” one person commented on the airport’s post.
On X, people criticized the airport and Delta for how they handled the situation.
“Thousands of people have been sitting here on the floor waiting to check in for a flight. Not being told what’s going on. Finally told ‘our computers are down, but I can’t even punch in’ by an employee who then immediately walked away after. Found out computers are down via X and local news. Sad.”
Another man took a video of the masses, claiming, “I’ve never seen it this crowded before.”
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