A computer glitch at a Dallas facility caused roughly a third of all Southwest Airlines flights to be delayed Wednesday night, creating a new headache for travelers.
The airline said a power outage at its Texas centre disrupted its computer systems, causing delays to some flights while staff restarted the systems.
“Southwest Airlines has resolved a temporary technical issue caused by a power outage at one of its Dallas-area data centers this afternoon,” an airline spokesperson said in a statement to The Washington Post.
“While overall operations continued, some flights across the system were delayed while our teams addressed the outage and restarted the system.”
On Wednesday night, 1,379 flights, or about 34% of Southwest’s total scheduled flights, were delayed. According to flight tracking site Flight Aware:It is unclear how many of those flights were directly affected by the outage or were delayed for other reasons, such as bad weather.
“We apologize to our customers and ask for their patience and understanding as we work to get them to their destinations as quickly and safely as possible,” Southwest Airlines said in a statement.
The airline has experienced groundings due to computer glitches in the past, with major delays and cancellations at airports in 2021, most notoriously during the 2022 holiday season.
The disruption, which occurred during the busiest travel period of the year in December 2022, led to the cancellation of around 17,000 Southwest Airlines flights and stranded more than 2 million passengers.
Southwest Airlines was hit with a $140 million civil penalty from the Department of Transportation last year over the disruptions.
