Roughly a third of all Southwest Airlines flights were delayed Wednesday evening following a computer outage at its Dallas facility in the latest headache for travelers.
The airline said a power outage at the Texas center disrupted its computer systems, causing some flights to be delayed as staffers rebooted the systems.
“Southwest Airlines has resolved a brief technology issue that was caused by a power outage at one of our data centers in the Dallas area this afternoon,” a spokesperson for the airline said in a statement to The Post.
“While we were able to continue overall operations, some flights across the system were delayed while our Teams addressed the outage and restarted systems.”
About 34% of all Southwest’s scheduled flights Wednesday night — 1,379 flights — were suffering delays, according to flight-tracking site Flight Aware. It’s unclear how many of those were directly affected by the system outage or were delayed for other reasons like inclement weather.
“We apologize to our Customers and appreciate their patience as we work to get them to their destinations as quickly and safely as possible,” Southwest said.
The airline has faced operations-halting computer outages in the past leading to major delays and cancellations at airports in 2021, and — most infamously — during the 2022 holiday season.
The December 2022 meltdown during one of the busiest travel times of the year led to nearly 17,000 Southwest flights being axed and over two million stranded passengers.
Southwest was hit with a $140 million civil penalty last year by the Department of Transportation for the mess.
