Fallout from Southwest technology outage continues

UPDATE:

While the Southwest Airlines website is back up and running, the fallout from Wednesday’s technology failure continues at El Paso International Airport.

Southwest Airlines is reporting more cancellations. As of 6:15 Thursday morning, three flights were completely cancelled. However, Southwest flight attendants tell ABC-7 this does not include connecting flights. If connecting flights elsewhere are cancelled, it will affect passengers in El Paso. It is also possible that there could be more cancellations in the afternoon.

ORIGINAL STORY:

Southwest Airlines flights across the country were held up Wednesday while the airline worked to fix technology problems.

Spokesman Brad Hawkins said Southwest began having intermittent problems with several systems after an outage.

“We are now managing flight delays across our system, with a temporary ground stop in place for those flights that have not left the gate,” Hawkins said in an emailed statement.

Hawkins said that systems were gradually coming back, but that it might take time before the airline could resume normal operations.

Anxious customers tweeted to Southwest that they could not check in for flights. The airline’s website wasn’t working normally – visitors couldn’t buy tickets, check in for flights, or check their flight’s status.

By about 4 p.m. Central time, Southwest had canceled 16 flights, more than any other U.S. carrier, and delayed about 150 others, according to tracking service FlightAware.com.

Airlines have sprawling, overlapping and complicated technology systems, and even brief outages can cause thousands of passengers to be stranded for hours.

Last October, an outage caused about 800 Southwest flights to be delayed and forced employees to issue tickets and boarding passes by hand. The airline blamed a software application, and it recovered in about a day. United Airlines and American Airlines both had computer problems last summer but fixed the problems within a day.

Dallas-based Southwest Airlines Co. carries more passengers within the United States than any airline. However, it is far smaller than American, Delta and United when international traffic is included.

Officials fixed the issue after a few hours and the ground stop was lifted.