ATLANTA -- Several hours after a "technical issue" grounded Delta Air Lines flights across the country, most schedules had returned to normal by Wednesday afternoon.
In fact, only a handful of flights were canceled due to the glitch - but officials still haven't explained exactly what happened.
Only three flights were reported canceled by 3 p.m. Wednesday, according to FlightAware, while less than 275 flights were delayed across the entire Delta Air Lines system, representing about 8 percent of the carrier's daily schedule. Delta has consistently been one of the nation's most on-time air carriers according to an online report from OAG.com with an 83.8 percent on-time performance rate.
But many of the airline's flights were affected by the systems outage Tuesday evening, forcing a nationwide ground stop for the airline for about an hour. The stop only applied to domestic flights on the ground. Flights already in the air were permitted to continue to their destinations.
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Delta acknowledged the technical issue just before 8 p.m. after customers began to complain of delays on social media Tuesday evening.
At 9:28 p.m., the carrier tweeted an update that said the issue had been resolved and that all ground stops had been lifted around the nation.
Delta advised customers to check ahead on the status of their flights but did not anticipate any major disruptions to flights for Wednesday.
"Additional flight delays and the impact on Wednesday morning's schedule are expected to be minimal. Delta apologizes to its customers for this inconvenience," the carrier said in a release Tuesday night. "Customers flying tonight or Wednesday should check their flight status on delta.com or the Fly Delta app."
The carrier has not provided additional details regarding the cause for the technical issue.
