DALLAS, July 21 (UPI) — A technical glitch that caused trouble for Southwest Airlines flights nationwide on Wednesday also canceled nearly 500 scheduled trips on Thursday and delayed many more.
The carrier experienced the problem Wednesday afternoon, which knocked the company website offline for a while. More than 700 flights were scrapped and hundreds of others were delayed.
Thursday, Southwest said nearly 450 flights were canceled due to lingering problems from the outage, “primarily as a result of displaced Crews and aircraft.”
“The recovery is starting off slowly. We are getting the momentum back,” Southwest Chief Operating Officer Mike Van de Ven said in a video posted to Facebook Thursday.
“We had a technology failure in our network, and we have redundant systems that should have kicked in place, but they didn’t,” he added. “So we are doing a deep dive on that.”
As part of its recovery effort, Southwest said it would expand a recent fare sale to customers as a small way to make it up to flyers.
“It’s never too early to say thank you or to extend an apology and we want to share those sentiments both with our hard-working Employees and our Customers. We’ll continue to work to make this right,” Southwest said in a news release.
Later, the carrier provided an update on the situation.
“Systems are stabilized and have been performing normally throughout today,” it said.
Southwest normally operates nearly 4,000 flights across the United States daily.
