Skift Take

Delta has been riding high despite a major summer meltdown. While third-quarter earnings fell slightly below Wall Street expectations, it’s expecting more growth in the fourth quarter. Election Day may cause a brief dip in travel demand.

Despite experiencing a summer meltdown that led to thousands of flight cancellations, Delta Air Lines still came out relatively strong.

The airline reported a net income of $1.27 billion during the third quarter, a 15% increase from the same time last year. 

However, the July CrowdStrike outage caused Delta’s revenues to be down from previous forecasts. In September, the carrier projected revenues to either stay flat or increase 1% due to the outage that cost it $380 million in lost revenue and $170 million in expenses. 

Delta’s earnings also came in slightly below Wall Street expectations partly because of the CrowdStrike outage. 

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