Southwest suffers technology problem for second straight day
DALLAS (AP) – Southwest Airlines said it was working Tuesday to restore normal operations after a technology-related issue impacted flights for the second straight day.
By the afternoon, the country’s fourth largest airline had canceled around 500 flights and delayed almost 1,300 more, according to the tracking service FlightAware. The combination of cancellations and delays affected roughly half of Southwest’s scheduled flights for the day.
The Federal Aviation Administration held all southwest departures for about 45 minutes while the company worked on fixing a computer problem, an agency spokeswoman said.
A spokesman for Dallas-based Southwest said an issue with the connectivity of the airline’s technology systems began around noon on Tuesday.
“Southwest is in the process of resuming normal operations after a brief pause in our flight operations due to intermittent performance issues with our network connectivity on Tuesday afternoon,” spokesman Dan Landson said in an email.
He said crews were working to limit flight disruptions and urged customers to check their flight status on the Southwest website or seek help from the airline’s airport agents.
On Monday night, problems with an outside weather data provider caused Southwest to delay around 1,500 flights. Delta Air Lines and Alaska Airlines reported separate technical issues affecting customers trying to book flights. Some Delta customers complained on Twitter that the airline’s website only had first class seats for sale.
Airline technology systems are prone to disruptions and failures that sometimes confuse thousands of flights. In recent years, a router failure paralyzed Southwest for days, and Delta employees at an airport dragged out an old dot matrix printer to create boarding passes. Airlines use huge, complicated IT systems that do everything from conducting flights to running mobile apps, and they are often overlaid with new programs.
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