Southwest says it has fixed glitch, expects flights to return to normal
Southwest says it has solved a computer glitch that delayed hundreds of flights Sunday and threatened more headaches on Monday.
The carrier tells Today in the Sky that it had fixed the glitch as of 8:10 a.m. ET and expects operations to return to normal Monday.
A tweet from Baltimore/Washington International Airport -- one of Southwest's busiest airports -- appears to back that up.
"All operations at BWI returning to normal with little to no delays and passenger lines are diminishing," the airport said in a tweet from 8:10 a.m. ET.
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Southwest acknowledge the issue in a Monday morning statement.
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"After a challenging Sunday for our Employees and Customers, we're expecting the technical systems that power our Customer Service to perform normally today," the airline said. "Teams worked throughout the night in advance of our first departures to ensure the smoothest operation today."
"Out of the 3600 daily flights in our schedule, 75% of flights operated ontime ... ," Southwest continued. "Our Employees worked around issues with primary systems and utilized back-up procedures to get our Customers and their checked luggage to their intended destinations. We have some additional work to do today to get bags delivered and some delayed or displaced Customers into open seats. We have teams working as quickly as possible to accomplish that."
Prior to Monday morning's news that the glitch had been resolved, Southwest had said it was still working to fix the problem. The carrier had been advising customers with flights Monday to check-in online and print their boarding passes at home or to be able to display them on their mobile devices. Southwest also advised passengers to arrive at the airport at least two hours ahead of their scheduled flight.
The carrier now expects operations to return to normal, though it said in its statement that "we continue to recommend that customers check-in online or on our app before reaching the airport, and that they present a printed or mobile boarding pass to check luggage, proceed through security screening, and reach the boarding door of our gates."
On Sunday, the unspecified computer glitch forced Southwest to manually check-in many passengers, requiring agents to write out boarding passes by hand. Online and mobile check-in appeared to be mostly unaffected, and many customers were able to check in via Southwest's airport kiosks. The biggest hold-up came for fliers trying to check bags for their flights.
The glitch began early Sunday, forcing the carrier to delay about several hundred flights. It was unclear how many flights might be impacted Monday.
That led to long lines -- "miles long," according to some social media accounts -- as the carrier struggled to keep ahead of check-in queues.
Images of long lines surfaced from busy Southwest airports like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Denver and Baltimore.
Passenger Ida Perez tweeted to NBC News that Sunday's check-in line at Las Vegas' McCarran International Airport wrapped around the building and down the street. Perez said she waited in line for over two hours before finally making her flight.
Emily Mitnick told The Associated Press she missed her 10 a.m. Sunday flight from Detroit to Denver even after arriving to the airport around 8 a.m. She estimated to the news agency that about 1,000 people were in the check-in line awaiting boarding passes. At curbside check-in, she guessed there were a couple hundred people in line there as well.
Mitnick says she did not clear security until about 10:15 a.m.
"The clock was ticking and the flight took off," Mitnick tells AP.
Elsewhere on Sunday, travelers took to Twitter to complain:
But some travelers had compassion for the workers and understood the airline was doing the best it could.
Southwest Airlines isn't the only airline to have technical issues in the past few months.
On September 17, "connectivity issues" halted American Airlines flights for about two hours at three of its hubs. And in early July a computer glitch attributed to a faulty router grounded United Airlines flights nationwide.
Contributing: Harriet Baskas from Seattle