Ben Mutzabaugh

USA TODAY

Delta’s flight disruption from Monday’s system outage was felt across the carrier’s entire worldwide network. And that included Tokyo’s Narita airport, where more than 1,000 travelers spent the night because of the outage.



"What a nightmare," American Jeff Quigley said to The Associated Press.

Quigley told the news agency he was able to get about two hours of sleep at Narita following the delay of his Monday afternoon flight to Manila. The flight was pushed to Tuesday morning.

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"I fly four to eight times a month, and this is the worst thing I've experienced so far,” Quigley said to AP.

Delta operates a hub at Tokyo Narita, serving a number of Asian destinations nonstop from there. The hub allows Delta to feed fliers arriving on its flights from the U.S. to connections in Asia via Narita.

Delta, of course, was hit by an outage to its global reservation system Monday morning. Delta cited a power failure, but power provider Georgia Power said whatever the issue was appeared to originate within Delta’s headquarters.

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Regardless of the cause, the snafu grounded 1,000 Delta flights and delayed 3,000 more. That meant nearly two-thirds of Delta’s Monday schedule ended up being delayed or canceled. And problems lingered into Tuesday morning as the carrier worked to gets its crews and planes back into place.

In Japan, AP says Monday’s outage “stranded many passengers in Japan. Six flights were cancelled, affecting 1,733 travelers, (Delta spokeswoman Hiroko Okada) said. Another 15 flights were delayed. The shutdown happened Monday afternoon, so many of the delays stretched overnight, forcing many more to find a place to sleep.”

Narita airport spokesman Katsuaki Tomimura tells AP more than 1,000 passengers ended up spending the night in an arrival lobby at the airport. That came after Delta canceled flight two flights to Honolulu and one each to New York, Minneapolis, Los Angeles and Atlanta, according to AP. Other flights – such as Quigley’s Manila flight – were delayed.



