Southwest Airlines Cancels Hundreds Of Flights Due To Computer Issues

Technology has many benefits, but one of the disadvantages is that people rely on it too much. That caused American budget airline, Southwest Airlines to cancel hundreds of flights after computer issues two days in a row.

Earlier on Monday (14/6/2021), an outage occurred at Southwest Airlines' weather provider. Weather information is mandatory for an aircraft to fly safely, so, since it did not work, it caused many problems for Southwest Airlines. Due to this, Southwest Airlines delayed 1,415 flights.

The following is a statement issued by Southwest Airlines at the time:

"While the vendor worked to restore connectivity, we implemented a ground stop to protect the safety of our crews and customers"

On Tuesday (15/6/2021), many angry Southwest Airlines passengers were spotted stranded on their airplane. However, since the weather provider was still down, the airline cancelled 494 flights and delayed an extra 1,562 flights. When Southwest Airlines thought things could not get any worse, it did. More IT issues started appearing left and right. This resulted in FAA temporarily suspending Southwest Airlines flights nationwide.

Here is a statement by Southwest Airlines on Tuesday:

"We are in the process of resuming normal operations after a system issue this afternoon that created flight disruptions throughout our network,”

“We know many Customers still require assistance and are working to address those concerns as quickly as possible."

As of now, all services are back to normal and the computer issues have been resolved. From this incident, we learnt one thing- never rely too much on technology.

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Written by: Sohail Sawlani

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