Southwest Airlines estimated 600-700 flights were delayed or canceled Wednesday.
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According to FlightAware.com as of 8:45 a.m. ET, there were 204 flights canceled for Thursday and another 113 flights delayed.
Southwest reported 300 additional flights were canceled July 21.
As of 7:30 a.m., more than 40 flights had been canceled at Midway, though it was not clear if those were all Southwest flights. Shortly thereafter, thousands of travelers from across the country then took to social media to complain of delayed flight departures and arrivals and the inability to check in for flights using Southwest’s Website. The airline posted a message with communications officer Linda Rutherford overnight on Twitter, asking customers to be “as patient as possible” while it works to bring the systems back up through the morning hours.
Southwest said that computer systems were gradually coming back, but it warned customers booked on Thursday flights to check their flight’s status online and arrive at the airport early because long lines were expected.
Earlier, Southwest airline officials tweeted that they were aware of the problem and said they were “investigating current issues with our systems”.
It said most systems are back online, but a full recovery will take some time.
#TRAVEL alert: long lines @ #Hobby this AM thanks to the #SouthwestAirlines glitch yesterday.
The airline is offering flexible rebooking services for passengers impacted by the delays.
Southwest suffered a similar outage last October, resulting in about 800 delayed flights. Southwest’s website crashed, and the airline briefly held up all departing flights on Wednesday. Due to this outage, company has to delay all their scheduled flights all over the world. Tracking service FlightStats Inc. put the numbers much higher – 400 cancellations and 2,000 delays.
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Cancellations stretched into Thursday as the airline worked to get crews and planes in position for flights. “If the flight is canceled we’ll probably just drive tomorrow, because all these people are going to be flying standby”.
