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Southwest Airlines flights face numerous delays from ‘brief’ power outage

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5 months ago

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Southwest Airlines flights face numerous delays from ‘brief’ power outage

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Southwest Airlines experienced a short computer outage Wednesday afternoon amid severe weather affecting the central and eastern U.S. that resulted in numerous flight delays, according to the carrier.

The airline said it “resolved a brief technology issue that was caused by a power outage at one of our data centers in the Dallas area this afternoon” in an email statement to USA TODAY.

“While we were able to continue overall operations, some flights across the system were delayed while our teams addressed the outage and restarted systems,” the airline continued.

“We apologize to our customers and appreciate their patience as we work to get them to their destinations as quickly and safely as possible.”

As of 6:30 p.m., 32%, or 1,311 of Southwest’s flights were delayed on Wednesday, according to FlightAware.

Flight delayed or canceled? What you’re owed if your flight is affected by weather.

Why is this getting attention?

Southwest’s technology has been under a microscope for years because of a previous meltdown. Over the winter holidays in 2022-2023, weather delays and backend technology issues conspired to cause a true meltdown for the airline. During a 10-day period in December 2022, the airline canceled nearly 17,000 flights, stranding passengers and baggage all around the country.

Since then, Southwest’s leadership has promised technology upgrades and other improvements to the airline’s operating procedures to prevent a similar issue from happening again, but any time the words “Southwest Airlines” and “technology” appear together on social media, it leads the internet to speculate if another meltdown is happening.

For its part, the airline said it was able to maintain its overall operations after this outage and is working to get flights that were affected back on track. 

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