Southwest Airlines still working through tech-caused glitches
Southwest Airlines worked Wednesday to clear the remaining technical issues that continued to delay and cancel fights from Denver International Airport.
DIA was leading the nation on tracking service FlightAware’s “Misery Map” on Wednesday morning with 22 delays and three flights canceled.
The Dallas-based airline, the nation’s fourth largest, experienced 566 cancellations Tuesday and 1,800 delayed flights, according to FlightAware. On Wednesday morning, that number stood at 416 delays and 269 cancellations nationwide.
“While our technology issues from Tuesday have been resolved, we are still experiencing a small number of cancelations and delays across our network as we continue working to resume normal operations,” Southwest spokesman Dan Landson said in an email statement.
“We ask that Customers visit Southwest.com to check their flight status or visit with a Customer Service Agent to assist them with their travel needs today.”
There’s no indication the technical problems were caused by any kind of ransomware attack, Landson said.
The Federal Aviation Administration held up all Southwest departures Tuesday for about 45 minutes while the company worked to fix that computer issue, an agency spokeswoman said.
On Monday night, problems with a third-party weather data provider caused Southwest to delay about 1,500 flights. Delta Air Lines and Alaska Airlines reported separate technical problems that affected customers trying to book flights.
Some Delta customers complained on Twitter that only first-class seats appeared for purchase on the airline’s website.
Airline technology systems are vulnerable to glitches and outages that sometimes snarl thousands of flights.
In the past few years, a router failure crippled Southwest for days and Delta employees at one airport dragged out an old dot-matrix printer to make boarding passes.
Airlines use huge, complicated IT systems that do everything from help operate flights to running mobile apps, and they are often overlaid with new programs.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.