![]() ![]() Southwest suffered a similar outage last October, resulting in about 800 delayed flights. It warned passengers to expect long lines, and to arrive at the airport early. To bounce back better, the airline reduced its load, canceling more than 200 flights or 5 percent of its daily schedule even before the day’s first flight. With so many flights canceled on Wednesday, Southwest knew that a large number of passengers would try to fly Thursday. When the outage hit, Southwest took the unusual step of briefly holding all departing flights at their gates. It took crews about 12 hours to restore most systems to working order. He said router failures aren’t uncommon, but this outage was unusually severe. It expects to replace the longstanding reservations system next year and replace other key systems over the next three to five years.Ĭhief operating officer Mike Van de Ven said when a router failed Wednesday, it slowed the airline’s technology systems so much that other functions weren’t usable. ![]() Southwest has an aging technology infrastructure, but Kelly said the airline has been making “significant investments” to upgrade it. “We need to understand why, and make sure that that doesn’t happen again.” “We have significant redundancies built into our mission-critical systems, and those redundancies did not work,” Kelly told reporters on a conference call. The company’s website crashed – Kelly estimated that Southwest might have lost between $5 million and $10 million in ticket sales because customers couldn’t book flights. On Wednesday, the airline said it canceled nearly 700 flights, and FlightStats said another 2,100 were delayed.įor hours after the outage started, airline employees had to check in passengers manually and couldn’t take new reservations. After “a day of recovery,” the airline hoped to be operating normally on Friday, said CEO Gary Kelly.īy early Thursday afternoon, Southwest had canceled more than 400 flights and at least 1,100 more were delayed, according to tracking service FlightStats Inc. Southwest said that “most systems” recovered and were functioning by Thursday morning. Backup systems didn’t work as expected, they said. DALLAS – Southwest Airlines struggled to recover Thursday from a massive computer outage, as several hundred more flights were canceled or delayed around the country.Īirline executives said a router breakdown set off a chain of failures in critical technology systems a day earlier. ![]()
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