Travelers say issues at DIA persisted through Saturday

DENVER (KDVR) — Even a day after a global tech outage impacted transportation, government offices, hospitals and more, flyers at Denver International Airport were still experiencing travel woes.

LaTosha Ellison said her experience started the morning the tech outage happened on Friday. She and her family were flying Frontier out of Denver and were alerted the plane was about to leave.

She said they raced to the terminal where they were told their seats had been given to flight attendants and they were not able to board. So, she and almost 20 other passengers headed to the customer service desk to figure out what to do next.

“By the time that we got someone to help us, we had been waiting in line for customer service [for] seven and a half hours,” Ellison said.

Ellison said customer service told them that, because it looked like they missed their flight, they couldn’t help them and wouldn’t reschedule their flight.

“It was people like just crying, sleeping on blow-up mattresses. Not $50 to their name being told, ‘I’m sorry, figure it out. We’re not paying for you to go home,'” Ellison recalled.

It was almost midnight by that point so she said she and her family headed to find a hotel, even though they didn’t have luggage, as it was already in Maryland, their intended destination.

They struck out at finding a hotel that wasn’t booked in Denver, so they had to drive to Colorado Springs to find one.

Ellison was one of thousands of people whose flights were impacted in Denver and who were continuing to experience cancellations and delays through Saturday.

FOX31 spoke to a few other travelers on Saturday flying with United Airlines who said they had also been delayed but received a voucher for a hotel.

Others said their flights were only delayed by 30 minutes, and that it seemed to them that the airport was slowly returning to normal as of Saturday night.

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