Families Left Scrambling After Delta Bars Minors From Flying Alone in Wake of Outage

Scott Darling and his wife drove their 17-year-old son, Asher, to the San Jose airport on Sunday morning and saw him off at the check-in counter. They were back in their car and pulling out of the airport when they got a frantic call: Delta Air Lines wouldn’t let Asher check in because he didn’t have a parent accompanying him on the flight.

“I was perplexed,” Mr. Darling said. Asher had flown by himself on several occasions, he said, and “we were never notified about this.”

Delta began to bar children under 18 from traveling without a guardian as it struggled to recover from the global technology outage Friday that affected Microsoft users and systems across the world, and forced airlines around the world to ground flights.

Its suspension of travel for unaccompanied minors, a measure implemented with little notice, left some children stranded across state lines or even in different countries, and it left families scrambling to book last minute flights on other airlines or arrange alternative transportation.

Some families, like the Darlings, said that they were not notified of the change until their children were turned away at the check-in counter, and that Delta offered little support or assistance.

The travel suspension, on top of the airline’s continued cancellations and delays, has shaken some customers’ long-held loyalty. Delta has been the slowest U.S. airline to restore its operations, canceling over 1,000 flights each day from Friday to Monday. Another 400 had been canceled as of 7 a.m. on Tuesday, according to the flight tracking website FlightAware.