A Southwest Airways airplane taxies from a gate at Baltimore Washington Worldwide Thurgood Marshall Airport on Oct. 11, 2021, in Baltimore. (Getty Pictures)
A widespread “expertise problem” delayed many Southwest Airways flights Wednesday afternoon.
The airline confirmed to KTLA that the difficulty was brought on by an influence outage at one in every of its knowledge facilities close to its headquarters in Dallas.
Officers for Southwest described the expertise problem as “transient” and stated the airline was in a position to proceed with general operations till the outage was corrected and its laptop programs have been restarted.
The flight monitoring web site FlightAware listed greater than 1,300 Southwest flights as being delayed as of 4 p.m. The web site DownDetector.com, which tracks web site and app outages, noticed a spike in experiences by customers who have been unable to entry the airline’s web site.
Vacationers took to social media to voice their frustration concerning delays, and the airline’s official accounts have been busy responding to a number of messages.
“We apologize to our Prospects and respect their endurance as we work to get them to their locations as rapidly and safely as potential,” a spokesperson informed KTLA.
Laptop points have plagued Southwest prior to now, most notably in December 2022, when hundreds of thousands of passengers have been stranded within the midst of a busy vacation journey weekend.
As many as 16,900 flights have been canceled in what some have been calling the greatest meltdown in trendy airline historical past. The cancellations have been initially blamed on adversarial climate however have been later attributed, partially, to points with the corporate’s laptop expertise.
Southwest in the end agreed to pay a $35 million high-quality as a part of a $140 million settlement to resolve a federal investigation launched by the U.S. Division of Transportation for violating shopper safety legal guidelines. The high-quality was 30 instances bigger than some other penalty ever issued by the DOT for shopper safety violations.
