Southwest Airlines spent Friday morning digging out from a technology breakdown that forced gate agents to check bags and board passengers the old-fashioned way, by hand. The airline said the trouble traced back to a brief interruption with its vendor Amadeus, and while no flights were grounded outright, the manual workarounds rippled into nearly 900 delays across the system.
Passengers first started noticing something was wrong shortly before 8 a.m. EDT, according to reports tracked on DownDetector and relayed by kget.com. Southwest confirmed it had experienced a brief outage affecting the systems used to check baggage and board flights, attributing the interruption to a system outage at its vendor, Amadeus, which supplies the reservation technology the carrier relies on.
At Dallas Love Field, where Southwest is headquartered, FlightAware's 9:15 a.m. figures showed delays and cancellations, according to Dallas News. Lauren Rounds, a spokesperson for the City of Dallas Department of Aviation, described it as an intermittent internal network outage that specifically hit boarding pass printing and mobile app scanning. The brief interruption affected Southwest flights nationwide.
Nearly 900 Delays, Dozens of Cancellations
The numbers piled up fast. Southwest logged nearly 900 delayed flights and 43 cancellations systemwide, according to FlightAware data cited by the paper. Love Field itself fared somewhat better, with 56 delayed flights and seven cancellations, suggesting the airline's home hub was less affected than Southwest's operations nationwide.
Southwest said it continued checking baggage and boarding flights manually as functionality was restored, and a Southwest spokesperson told KGET that service was not halted, just slowed due to manual processes. The carrier later said it had restored full functionality, apologized to customers for the inconvenience, and said it had prioritized the safety of its customers and employees throughout the disruption.
A Rough Stretch for Southwest's Reliability
Friday's hiccup lands at an awkward moment for Southwest, whose on-time performance has been sliding all year. The carrier's on-time rate fell from 79.75% in January to 64.94% in June, according to OAG data reported by Simple Flying. That decline culminated in a brutal weekend in June, when the airline logged 5,651 delays over just three days, per the same outlet.
Friday's Amadeus-linked stumble is unlikely to help the carrier's on-time performance, even though the airline insists the root cause was external rather than a problem of its own making.
Not the First Amadeus-Linked Meltdown
Southwest is far from the only carrier exposed to Amadeus. A separate outage of the company's Altea software previously disrupted systems at airports including Heathrow and Gatwick in London, Paris's CDG, Melbourne, Washington, D.C., and Singapore, according to Data Center Dynamics.
For now, Southwest says its systems are back up and running.
