Southwest urges travelers to check their flight status and plan to arrive at airports early as the outage may have resulted in long lines and delays.
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The Dallas-based carrier canceled 335 of its 3,900 daily flights Thursday after dropping 700 from its Wednesday schedule following the mid-afternoon crash of its network.
Southwest said it canceled almost 700 flights Wednesday and “hundreds more” were delayed – tracking service FlightStats Inc. put the delays at almost 2,100.
Customers also reported problems accessing the airline’s website and mobile app, which prevented them from booking flights or checking in for an upcoming trip. Thank you for hanging in there with us. At Mineta San Jose International Airport, nine Southwest flights had been canceled.
With so many flights canceled on Wednesday, Southwest knew that a large number of passengers would try to fly Thursday.
Mike Van de Ven, Southwest’s chief operating officer, on Thursday offered an apology to customers stuck at airports across the country and to employees working to clear a backlog of delayed flights. They said the next available flight is Sunday.
Airlines have sprawling, overlapping and complicated technology systems, and even brief outages can cause thousands of passengers to be stranded for hours.
Anxious customers tweeted to Southwest that they could not check in for flights.
Last October, an outage caused about 800 Southwest flights to be delayed and forced employees to issue tickets and boarding passes by hand.
Southwest said in a statement Thursday that most systems are back online.
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Southwest Airlines Co., the nation’s fourth-biggest airline, said revenue in the second quarter increased 5 percent to $5.38 billion, with about half the increase due to a new credit card deal it signed with Chase Bank past year. “The recovery is staring off slowly, we have 335 cancellations, which will allow us to improve during the day”. The Nashville, Tennessee, resident was still waiting for a flight Thursday morning.
