Bad Buzz for Delta after CrowdStrike fiasco

The CrowdStrike tech outage, starting late July 18th, caused massive flight cancellation at United, American and other airlines. Delta, however, was the worst-affected. With over 6,000 flights cancelled in less than a week, the airline is now the subject of a federal investigation.

Delta’s bad fortune has been making headlines all week, and Americans have been hearing about it. The chart below shows Buzz scores for four major airlines during the period since the outage. Buzz is a net score which measures whether people have been hearing more positive or negative things about a brand.

The day before the outage, Delta’s Buzz score was 4.7, meaning that, overall, people were hearing good things about them. Yet soon after the CrowdStrike cancellations began, Buzz began to fall, reaching -5.0 by July 29.

While other airlines such as United also saw a minor dip with the cancellations, they were also quicker than Delta to restore service, meaning that their Buzz was not as affected. American Airlines, which was caught up in the initial groundings, recovered almost immediately. This quick response may be related to a minor bump in Buzz during this period.

Southwest Airlines even saw a slight improvement in Buzz during the first couple of days of the cancellations. This may be because Southwest, which uses an outdated version of Windows, was unaffected by the CrowdStrike outage.

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Methodology: YouGov BrandIndex collects data on thousands of brands every day. Buzz score is based on the question: "Over the PAST TWO WEEKS, which of the following airlines have you heard something POSITIVE about (whether in the news, through advertising, or talking to friends and family)? / Now which of the following have you heard something NEGATIVE about over the PAST TWO WEEKS?" and delivered as a net score between -100 and +100. Scores are based on a average daily sample size of 923 adults between July 18 and July 29, 2024. Figures are based in a two-week moving average. Learn more about BrandIndex.