Flight delays and cancellations continue at MSP Airport

More than 160 flights were cancelled and over 460 flights delayed at Minneapolis St. Paul International Airport Sunday as airlines continued to grapple with outages caused by technology issues that began on Friday.

Kyle Potter, executive editor the Thrifty Traveler website, said Delta has cancelled more flights than any other airline.

“This has ceased to be just an IT problem,” Potter said. “It’s now a Delta problem.”

Mary Shannon, 67, thought she was in the clear when she went to bed Saturday night, bags packed for her return trip to Washington.

But hours before her noon flight on Sunday, she found out it was cancelled.

“I just wished I would have known the severity of it, because I would have booked a rental car,” she said. “If they would have said, ‘This is going to be really bad and we’re not going to be able to get people out of here until Tuesday at the earliest,’ then we would have been on our way.”

Shannon had no luck booking a rental car Sunday morning, so she joined the line of over 100 passengers at MSP, waiting to talk to a booking agent in person.

Nationwide, United has more than 250 canceled flights. Airline easyJet has 907 delays and 169 cancellations. Fourth on the list of cancelled and delayed flights nationwide is Delta subsidiary Endeavor Air, at 149 cancelations and more than 187 delays.

As travelers have remained stranded waiting for flights to return from the program outages on Friday, airport spokesperson John Welbes said the airport has asked vendors and custodial staff to extend hours for those who wait at the terminals.

“Our operations continue to be run at a good clip, even after hours, for emptying trash, keeping restrooms, clean, that sort of thing.”

Welbes said across the airport, operations are beginning to recover, as they see fewer cancellations and delays from various airlines.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg spoke on Sunday with the CEO of Delta Air Lines, following the carrier’s cancellation of thousands of flights since Friday due to a widespread IT-systems outage and as it continued to try to restore operations, a department official told Reuters.

Delta CEO Ed Bastian told customers on Sunday that the carrier had canceled 3,500 flights through Saturday. Flightaware said Delta on Sunday had canceled another 899 flights -- or 24 percent of its schedule. Buttigieg during the call reminded Bastian of the airline's responsibilities to customers and the department's enforcement role, the official added.

Reuters News Service contributed to this report.