Zach Wichter and Kathleen Wong of USA Today report that a brief power outage at the airline’s data center affected flights and brought down their website. They write:
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.[…]
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.
Read more here.
