Delta Airlines has revealed a small fire resulted in a power outage that led Delta Airlines to cancelling thousands of flights this week. The small fire + 300 datacenter components (probably routers, switches, and servers) that did not switch to backup power forced Delta Airlines cancel a lot of flights while they worked on restoring everything to normal.
Monday morning an uninterrupted power source switch experienced a small fire which resulted in a massive failure at Delta’s Technology Command Center. This caused the power control module to malfunction, sending a surge to a transformer outside of Delta, resulting in the loss of power. The power was stabilized and power was restored quickly. But when this happened, critical systems and network equipment didn’t switch over to backups. Around 300 of about 7,000 data center components were discovered to not have been configured appropriately to avail backup power. In addition to restoring Delta’s systems to normal operations, Delta teams this week have been working to ensure reliable redundancies of electrical power as well as network connectivity and applications are in place.
Source: Delta Airlines