Southwest Airlines slowly recovering from computer breakdown
Southwest Airlines fixed a computer glitch that caused flights to be grounded along the West Coast for 2½ hours Friday night and officials were urging passengers to check about their flight status as the backlog cleared.
Planes began taking off about 10:30 p.m., said company spokesman Brad Hawkins. The company estimated that 250 flights had been affected by a shutdown in the computer software used to dispatch flights.
Hawkins said the airline was relying on a slower backup system.
“We sincerely appreciate everyone’s patience as we work diligently now to get people where they are supposed to be,” Hawkins said in an email.
The system shutdown began about 8 p.m. Pacific time.
Southwest had 3,400 flights scheduled on Friday. For much of the evening, many of the company’s passengers found themselves unsure if the planes they had already boarded would take off at all.
Finance manager Scott Williams said that by 10:30 p.m., he had been sitting in a Southwest plane at LA/Ontario International Airport for nearly three hours.
At one point, Williams, of Napa, said half the passengers were told to get off the plane, only to return soon afterward.
“It’s been a long day,” he said.
A Southwest spokesman told City News Service on Saturday that flight schedules were getting back to normal but that passengers should check to determine whether their flight was suffering from delays.
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