A computer glitch grounded Southwest Airlines flights for hours Wednesday afternoon, causing nationwide delays for stranded passengers before airports began allowing departures using a manual system, an airline official said.
The first signs of trouble started sometime before noon, as hundreds of frustrated travelers took to Twitter and Instagram to vent about being stuck on planes or in terminals, or missed connections, while Southwest officials pleaded with them to be patient.
By about 2:45 p.m., a Southwest official said flights were starting to depart airports across the country, but hours later passengers continued to deal with the residual effects of delayed or canceled flights, as the company’s computers remained down.
Bay Area airport officials received word of the Southwest glitches and subsequent delays around 12:30 p.m., said representatives from the Oakland and San Jose international airports. Airplanes were allowed to land but not to depart, the airports said.
On social media, one woman said she was concerned her 12-year-old daughter, who was flying alone to camp, would be stuck in the airport overnight. Representatives told her that Southwest would refund her daughter’s ticket.
Oakland police chaplain the Rev. Jayson Landeza, who was traveling from Albuquerque to Oakland using Southwest on Wednesday, said his fellow passengers were “pretty calm.”
“Southwest is treating us fine,” Landeza said. “As long as I have some books on Kindle, I’m OK.”
Landeza lauded Southwest for keeping passengers informed of the glitches, and he said he was relieved that he was able to wait inside the terminal, rather than on the tarmac, as some passengers did.
In a statement and repeatedly via social media, representatives from the airline apologized to customers for the delay. Officials said an outage caused “intermittent performance issues … with multiple technology systems.”
“We have a team of experts working diligently to resolve the technical issues and their efforts have systems gradually coming back online,” officials said in a statement.
Rosemary Barnes, a spokeswoman for Mineta San Jose International Airport, said that flights were able to begin departing the airport shortly after 2 p.m., and Doug Yakel, a spokesman for San Francisco International Airport said, as of around 1:30 p.m., flights were departing.
Southwest is using manual systems until the airline is fully operational, an official from Southwest said.
Representatives from the Oakland, San Francisco and San Jose airports said they couldn’t immediately determine how many Southwest passengers or how many flights were impacted by the delay, and Southwest officials have given no indication of when the flight schedules would return to normal.
“We expect to continue our move toward a normal operation but believe it will take time,” representatives said in a statement.
Contact Erin Baldassari at 510-208-6428. Follow her at Twitter.com/e_baldi.
