A computer glitch in Southwest Airline’s system caused immense trouble for the passengers, preventing them from checking in for their flights, resulting in unprecedented delays across the nation this Sunday. The fault was traced back to a failure of a legacy technology used by Southwest, with the actual failure being attributed to system overload. The legacy technology was required to do more than it was designed for, travel experts said.
Southwest revealed some details concerning the source of the problem, which caused 836 out of the 3355 scheduled flights to be delayed. Long lines were witnessed at various airports across the country. Following the glitch, airline staff was forced to issue the tickets manually, while a backup system was utilized to check in passengers into their respective flights.
According to Brad Hawkins, Southwest Airline’s spokesman, the fault in the software application had been fixed on Monday. No additional details were provided by him with regarding the application itself. He did, however, claim that no external factors – such as hackers – were involved.
But according to experts, the problem was much more serious.
“It was much more than a bag glitch. They were down to writing tickets and boarding passes by hand,” explains Joe Brancatelli, who focuses on travel issues for biztravelife.com. “It seemed like a systemwide outage of their passenger service systems.”
The CEO of Flight Aware, Daniel Baker, said that these types of problems are happening more frequently due to airline mergers and the ongoing efforts to prolong the life of old ticketing systems.
“The airlines are operating with legacy systems that were designed when the airlines were a lot smaller than they are now,” he stated. “If you look at the fleet size in the 1980s compared to today, the growth has been extraordinary. They’re trying to scale these platforms for the much larger airline they’ve become and it’s hard to keep up with the passengers’ expectations.”
Brancatelli added that the complex nature of programming as well as networking keeping passengers moving also works against a speedy fix if something does go wrong.
Due to the airlines’ efforts of automating systems, a lot of things have to be fixed following an outage. This is because when a system goes down, it also takes down everything connected to it.
A statement was issued by Southwest on Monday telling passengers that the system would become operational very soon. The statement read, “Today we are expecting the technical systems that power our Customer Service to perform normally. Teams worked throughout the night in advance of our first departures to ensure the smoothest operation of our originating and later flights.”
This is certainly not the first time an airline had to face an issue related to its automated processes in 2015. Both American Airlines and United have already had major outages this year.
Four airlines in the US manage almost 80 percent of the entire traffic in the US – and all of them have experienced some type of a glitch in their systems as an indirect result of their cost-cutting measures.
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