Southwest suffers technology outage; flights held at gates

HOUSTON -- Southwest says it has fixed computer problems that caused hundreds of flights to be canceled, but it is telling passengers to get to the airport early because there could be long lines.

The airline has already canceled more than 220 flights on Thursday.

Several of the airline's technology systems were affected by an outage that started Wednesday afternoon, causing the cancellation of nearly 700 flights and delays for hundreds more.

Southwest's website crashed, and the airline briefly held up all departing flights on Wednesday.

Southwest says in a statement that most systems are back online.

Full statement:

Southwest Airlines reports that most systems are back online Thursday morning, following performance issues with multiple technology systems as a result of an outage Wednesday afternoon. As of 6:30 a.m. Central Daylight Time, we have canceled more than 220 flights on Thursday and continue to manage the flight disruptions created across our system. We are focused on getting Customers and their luggage safely to their travel destinations and apologize to our Customers whose travel plans are impacted. Customers who are booked to travel should check flight status information on Southwest.com and plan to arrive to the airport early, as long lines may occur. Flexible rebooking accommodation will be available to Customers through Sunday.

As a result of the technical issues we canceled nearly 700 flights Wednesday and hundreds more were delayed. Employees worked around issues with primary systems and utilized back-up procedures to get as many Customers and checked luggage to their intended destinations as we worked to fix the system.

It's never too early to say thank you and to extend our apologies and we want to share those sentiments both with our hard-working Employees and our loyal and understanding Customers, whom we hope to welcome back for a better experience soon. We'll continue to work individually with our affected Customers to make this right.

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