DALLAS — Southwest said it has mostly fixed computer problems that caused hundreds of flights to be canceled or delayed, but the airline warned passengers that there could be long lines at airports on Thursday.
The airline hoped to bounce back partly by reducing its load — Southwest canceled more than 220 flights, or about 5 percent of its schedule, early on Thursday.
Southwest said it canceled nearly 700 flights Wednesday and “hundreds more” were delayed — tracking service FlightStats Inc. put the delays at nearly 2,100.
The airline said “most systems are back online” after problems that began with an outage Wednesday afternoon and continued intermittently well into the night.
“We know we disappointed customers today. We are really, really sorry about that,” spokeswoman Linda Rutherford said in a video that the airline posted Wednesday night. “That is unacceptable to us.”
The airline said that it was trying to accommodate stranded passengers on new flights. Because of that, it expected long lines and told passengers to arrive early for Thursday flights.
Southwest officials said they had not identified the cause of the outage. Several of the airline’s technology systems were affected for several hours. The airline briefly held up all departing flights on Wednesday, and its website and electronic check-in systems failed.
After a similar outage last October resulted in 800 delayed flights, Southwest blamed a faulty software application.
Scores of Las Vegas flights were canceled or delayed Wednesday and Thursday after the Wednesday midafternoon glitch that affected multiple tech systems.
For about three hours, Southwest customers could not log into their accounts, check in for flights or access the website. At one point, the airline grounded its flights in an attempt to allow for schedule adjustments, but delays that occurred earlier in the day cascaded into new problems.
At one point, the system was running, but it crashed a second time late Wednesday.
Southwest President and CEO Gary Kelly has scheduled an earnings conference call later Thursday and he’s expected to make some remarks about Wednesday’s technology systems crash from which the airline is still attempting to recover.
Kelly said in a statement Thursday that “the worst is behind us,” as the airline works to reschedule tens of thousands of passengers on flights to their destinations. In many of Southwest’s busiest airports, lines were more than 200 people long at ticket counters and some people complained of being on hold on the telephone for more than three hours.
Review-Journal writer Rick Velotta contributed to this report.
