A power outage at a Southwest Airlines facility in Texas resulted in disruptions and delays to over 1300 flights on Wednesday 29 May.
According to news reports the brief power outage occurred at the airlines Dallas, Texas data center. This resulted in the airlines computer systems going down temporarily.
Power Outage in Dallas
The disruption to computer systems then led to flight delays whilst personnel attempted to rectify the problem and reboot computer systems.
Southwest issued a confirming statement via a spokesperson following the service disruption.
“Southwest airlines has resolved a brief technology issue that was caused by a power outage at one of our data centres in the Dallas area this afternoon.”
“While we were able to continue overall operations, some flights across the system were delayed. This occurred while our teams addressed the outage and restarted systems.”
Flight Disruptions
The outage, whilst relatively brief, resulted in disruptions to over 1,300 flights before the computer system was brought back online.
According to the news source Axios, Southwest Airlines clarified that the power outage was an isolated incident. The issue was not related to previous events experienced by the airline in the past.
The airline also confirmed that the power issue was not the result of recent severe weather conditions which affected the north of Texas.
The previous events referred to by the carrier relate to a major incident which occurred in December 2022.
That event was the result of a computerised crew scheduling system failing under pressure. A period of extreme bad weather over a holiday long weekend resulted in a systems overload.
At the time, the systems failure saw south-west cancel more than 16,700 flights between December 21 and December 31.
Following the event the US carrier initiated a major upgrade to its scheduling software systems.
As confirmed by the carrier, the power outage experienced in Dallas on Wednesday was not related to this issue.
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