Southwest Airlines struggles to recover after massive outage

Southwest Airlines played “catch-up” Thursday after a massive computer outage the day before caused several hundred flights to be canceled or delayed across the country.

Some travelers at the El Paso International Airport were still waiting Thursday afternoon to fly out of the city.

Officials said the system is back to normal, but staff is still struggling to get people where they need to go.

The line inside the El Paso airport has decreased significantly since Wednesday, but passengers told ABC-7 their flights were still delayed for at least an hour.

Airline executives said the cause of the outage was a router breakdown, which then set off a chain of failures in critical technology systems. Backup systems didn’t work as expected, they said.

The glitch caused the company’s website to crash, check-in kiosks were down and all departing flights were grounded, causing 700 flight cancellations.

Thursday morning, more than 200 flights had been canceled. As of Thursday afternoon, Southwest Airlines officials said 450 flights had been canceled.

One family told ABC-7 said they flew from Tennessee to Houston, and were forced to stay in Houston overnight because their flight back to El Paso was canceled.

“We experienced a very long day, full of obstacles,” said Akisha Downing. “We’ve been waiting in the airport all evening. We luckily got on standby and was able to get to our final destination.”

Officials sent a statement to ABC-7, stating “We’re continuing our focus on getting customers and their baggage to their destinations safely. Our employees in airports, online, and on the phone are assisting customers in large numbers and that is taking longer than average.”

It is recommending those who have flights booked for the weekend, to re-book flights for after Sunday if possible.

It added that customers who are holding booked travel Wednesday the 20th through Sunday the 24th of July are under flexible accommodation consideration and have two weeks from their original date of departure to re-book travel at the original fare, at no additional cost

Officials said the company has taken steps to prevent the outage from happening again, and extends an apology to both employees and customers.