The Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson Airport is the busiest airport in the world, handling over 250,000 passengers a day, which made the power outage on Monday, December 28th that much worse. Over 900 flights were grounded, stranding thousands of passengers in an airport and surrounding areas without power. Without air conditioning, the airport was sweltering, according to many personal accounts of the incident. Here's a tweet of the incident.
#BREAKING: Channel 2's @NefertitiWSB has learned @JetBlue, @United, @SouthwestAir, @AmericanAir have cancelled ALL FLIGHTS due to #poweroutage at @ATLairport. https://t.co/QuYGCxJ6lSÂ pic.twitter.com/kt2rfU7q6v
— WSB-TV (@wsbtv) December 17, 2017
And it wasn't just passengers in the airport that were affected. Flights that had boarded just prior to the outage had passengers who were sitting on the flight for up to over 12 hours because there was no place to dock and get them off. If there was a silver lining to that, at least they had air conditioning. This power outage was a disaster for Delta, who headquarters in Atlanta, and many other airlines. There's no other way to put it, other than that this was an utter corporate disaster.