• by Tanya Gazdik , July 22, 2024

Travelers are continuing to encounter chaos at airports.

Apparently at Spirit Airlines, it dates back several weeks and had nothing to do with the CrowdStrike update bug on Friday. 

"Spirit Airlines fired two gate agents for yelling at passengers to “shut up” earlier this month at Hollywood Burbank Airport,” according to USA Today. “Kevin Eis, a Spirit Airlines passenger who was flying from Burbank to Las Vegas on July 12, captured the incident on video in a couple of now-viral TikToks. The videos show the frustrated gate agents in front of a crowd of passengers for two different Spirit flights.”

The heated exchange happened at Hollywood Burbank Airport in California when passengers waiting to board a morning flight that had been delayed for over eight hours began questioning the holdup, according to Inside Edition.

"Do you all wanna get on this flight or not," the agent was captured on video telling passengers. "Everyone's gonna shut up and we're gonna say this once and we're only gonna say it again because we're frustrated as hell.”

Spirit Airlines tells Inside Edition the two agents have been suspended.

"We apologize to our guests for this experience, which does not reflect Spirit's high standards for guest service," the airline said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Delta Air Lines is still recovering from the CrowdStrike update bug that caused many Microsoft-enabled computers on Friday to freeze following a faulty software update.

CEO Ed Bastian says the carrier is struggling to track down its flight attendants and get them where they were needed to operate flights.

“Delta uses CrowdStrike and Microsoft Windows for a ‘significant’ number of its applications, and, crucially, the outage took a crew tracking tool offline,” according to PaddleYourOwnKanoo.com. “Since then, Delta’s scheduling team have been unable to keep up with the ‘unprecedented’ number of changes caused by the outage and has lost track of where its flight attendants are. Flight cancellations and delays have quickly piled up, with flight attendants out of position to operate flights, and the airline is seemingly unable to pair up available crew members with the planes they should be working on.”

Delta canceled more than 1,000 more flights Monday alone, according to flight tracking service FlightAware, when counting both Delta’s mainline operations and Endeavor, its regional airline that feeds its system under the Delta Connection brand.

“Those 1,000 flights represented just over half of all flights canceled by airlines worldwide on Monday, and about three-quarters of the flights within, to or from the United States, as most carriers returned to normal operations,” according to CNN Business. “Other US airlines had 2% or fewer of their flights canceled. Monday’s problems follow 1,500 flights that Delta canceled on Friday and nearly 3,000 more flights over the weekend.”

Bastian said it could be days before Delta moves past the incident, according to a video message sent to employees Monday.

“Delta has fared the worst among US carriers, with most other airlines getting back on track over the weekend,” according to Yahoo Finance. The problems which began on Friday “created a cascading effect — not unlike that which paralyzed Southwest Airlines Co. in December 2022 — leaving Delta unable to get its crews and planes fully aligned.”

More than half of Delta’s IT systems worldwide are Windows based. 

“The CrowdStrike error required Delta’s IT teams to manually repair and reboot each of the affected systems, with additional time then needed for applications to synchronize and start communicating with each other,” according to WCVB in Boston.