Are airline systems crashing more, or does it just seem that way?
- Thousands of travelers had their flights delayed by a glitch in Southwest’s systems in July, with passengers left with the impossible choice of renting cars for a 12-hour drive or sleeping in the airport.
- In August, a power outage in Atlanta caused a systems outage for Delta that grounded most of its flights.
- A Transportation Safety Administration glitch in May 2016 took a baggage-screening system offline, stranding thousands of bags at the Phoenix airport. Passengers weren’t directly affected, but did arrive at their destinations without their luggage.
- British Airways passengers in September weren’t able to check in, and some of them had the strange experience of receiving hand-written boarding passes. Flights were fine and operating normally otherwise: checkin and ticketing were the problems.
- Problems with the weight reporting system at United delayed flights across the airline’s whole system in October.
- Travel software company Sabre’s outage caused online booking problems for Southwest, Virgin, and JetBlue in October.
- A one-hour outage at United two weeks ago led to cascading delays across all of United’s flights.
- Just last week, Delta canceled hundreds of flights due to a Sunday night systems outage. Compounding the possible cancellations and delays was the problem that travelers weren’t able to look up whether their flight was canceled or delayed, because that’s the system that was out.
Published February 9, 2017
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