‘...what it called a power outage...’
Hard to believe. Companies like Delta have backup power and detailed disaster recovery procedures. For my $ I think they got hacked and dont want to admit it.
Bingo. They haven't been the only airline to have "problems" lately. It's building up to a failure of massive proportions very soon. 9/11 will pale when hundreds or thousands of planes crash or are forced to land on any stretch of road or farmer's field they can find.
Even if not a single plane crashes, think of the amount of personal and corporate info stolen.
Former company rented space at an enormous data center. Place had bulletproof power in place - multiple sources, plenty of UPS, generated power for days. No worries, right?
Not so much. We got hit twice about a month apart, two power "hiccups". Downtime length doesn't really matter, if the power goes out for 5 seconds or 5 days, you've lost everything in-flight, computers are going to reboot, etc. We lost a fair number of harddrives when all of the servers cycled. Major PITA.
Much, much later I heard (unofficially, through an engineer there) that the outages were caused by a disgruntled employee who knew where the weak points were.
So - it happens. Not unimaginable.