DALLAS, Dec. 21 (UPI) — Technical difficulties with Southwest Airlines’ website impacted potential travelers for hours Tuesday — a day when the carrier saw nearly a quarter of its flights delayed.
The glitch began on the website Tuesday morning and lasted, off and on, for a few hours — preventing some customers from booking travel and checking in for flights.
A screenshot on the site, posted by USA Today, said, “We’re working hard to get you where you want to be. Please do not refresh your browser. We will automatically transfer you to Southwest.com as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience.”
The outage came at a time holiday travel is ramping up across the United States. Southwest has hubs in Dallas, Chicago, Las Vegas and Phoenix.
“We are currently experiencing issues with some of Southwest.com’s functionality,” the carrier initially said on its social media pages. “We are working hard to resolve the issue. We appreciate our Customers’ patience as we work behind the scenes to get full functionality back to our website, and we have implemented flexible accommodations for those being affected.”
Three hours later, the airline said it was still “experiencing limited issues” and would implement “flexible accommodations for those affected through Wednesday, December 21.”
The carrier said no flights were affected by the website glitch, but the flight-tracking website FlightAware showed nearly 900 flights delayed for Southwest on Tuesday — more than any other airline, by far. It was unclear, however, whether those delays were related to the website outage.
The number of delayed flights represented nearly a quarter of Southwest’s entire schedule Tuesday.
