Delta expects normal operations by Thursday as flight disruptions ease

By David Shepardson and Rajesh Kumar Singh

(Reuters) -Delta Air Lines is making progress in restoring its services from a global cyber outage and would resume normal operations Thursday, CEO Ed Bastian said.

The Atlanta-based carrier has been hit hard by the outage and has axed more than 6,000 flights since last Friday, leaving hundreds of thousands of travelers stranded.

Just 1% of flights on Wednesday had been canceled.

Bastian raised some eyebrows, however, for traveling to Paris on Wednesday for the start of the Summer Olympics later this week even as the airline grapples with the disruptions.

Delta is the official airline of the U.S. Olympic Team. The company said he flew on a regularly scheduled Delta flight and has meetings with leaders and business partners in Paris.

"Ed delayed this long-planned business trip until he was confident the airline was firmly on the path to recovery," Delta said in a statement, adding Bastian remained fully engaged with senior operations leaders.

The carrier canceled just 47 flights, or about 1% of the scheduled total on Wednesday as of 12:15 p.m. EST, according to data from FlightAware. Bastian said the cancellations on Wednesday were expected to be "minimal," with operations becoming normal on Thursday.

"Our initial efforts to stabilize the operations were difficult and frustratingly slow and complex," he said in a statement. "We have made good progress this week and the worst impacts of the CrowdStrike-caused outage are clearly behind us."

A software update by global cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike triggered system problems for Microsoft customers, including many airlines, on Friday. But disruptions subsided the next day at other major U.S. carriers while persisting at Delta.

The U.S. Transportation Department opened an investigation Tuesday into the Delta disruptions, which affected more than 500,000 passengers and stranded people across the United States.

Many customers complained of waiting hours for assistance while others were forced to rent cars, drive hundreds of miles to get to destinations, or wait days for new flights.

Representative Rick Larsen, the top Democrat on the House Transportation Committee, said he will introduce legislation to boost the operational resilience of airlines. "The slow response by some airlines to this meltdown has been unacceptable," Larsen said.

Senate Commerce Committee chair Maria Cantwell said she is concerned Delta is not complying with passenger rights obligations under a new law.

(Reporting by David Shepardson and Rajesh Kumar Singh; Additional reporting by Joey Roulette in Washington; Editing by Angus MacSwan, Kevin Liffey and Nick Zieminski)