Bad router blamed for 1,000 canceled Southwest flights

Jennifer Bold and Laura Weddle were supposed to be back home by Thursday evening.

Instead, on Thursday morning they found themselves in line for coffee at McCarran International Airport, booking new flights for Saturday, the earliest they could find.

“We decided that we would come up here, get some coffee and take a deep breath,” said Bold, 46.

Southwest Airlines officials said a bad router and the failure of a redundant backup system led to the two-day systems crash that canceled more than 1,000 flights for McCarran International Airport’s busiest commercial air carrier. It took 12 hours to reboot 400 computer servers to get the system operating.

Southwest officials said Thursday that the system has been repaired, but the problem now is that it will take time for the airline to have planes and personnel in place to restore normal operations.

The airline hoped to bounce back partly by reducing its load — Southwest canceled more than 300 flights, or just more than 5 percent of its schedule, early on Thursday.

Southwest said it canceled nearly 700 flights Wednesday and “hundreds more” were delayed — tracking service FlightStats Inc. put the delays at nearly 2,100.

The airline said “most systems are back online” after problems that began with an outage Wednesday afternoon and continued intermittently well into the night.

Mike Van de Ven, Southwest’s chief operating officer, said the company’s southwest.com website, which was down for about three hours Wednesday and prevented customers from logging on, booking flights and modifying reservations, is functioning normally.As a result, customers can now go into their records and make their own flight changes and the airline will preserve the original price of the flight as long as the changes are within two weeks of the outage.

Because the system crashed during a fare sale that customers couldn’t access, Southwest opted to extend the sale another week.

“We know we disappointed customers today. We are really, really sorry about that,” spokeswoman Linda Rutherford said in a video that the airline posted Wednesday night. “That is unacceptable to us.”

Southwest President and CEO Gary Kelly opened his second-quarter earnings call Thursday morning with an apology and an update on the outage.

Kelly said in a statement Thursday that “the worst is behind us,” as the airline works to reschedule tens of thousands of passengers on flights to their destinations. In many of Southwest’s busiest airports, lines were more than 200 people long at ticket counters and some people complained of being on hold on the telephone for more than three hours.

Bold and Weddle said they spent about an hour in the ticketing line, working to get their luggage check-in and flights rescheduled. Bold said she wasn’t sure if Southwest was offering any compensation for their delayed plane, but she said she hopes they’ll offer food to people who have to stay at the airports.

They won’t be able to return home to Condon, Oregon, until Saturday, but they’re taking it in stride, one coffee and breakfast sandwich at a time.

“We’ll get home, but now our decision is, do we just camp out at the airport for the next day or do we book a hotel?” she said.

McCarran spokeswoman Christine Crews said the airport was notified Wednesday afternoon that Southwest was having technical difficulties. Airport staff handed out water bottles to people waiting in the ticketing line and separated people who needed one-on-one assistance, or help with delayed flights.

“Even though this is an airline issue, we as an airport jump in to help out as much as possible,” she said, adding that Southwest brings in more than a million people a month, making up about 40 percent of McCarran’s traffic.

Nicole Tomaino and her family waited Thursday by the McCarran airport baggage claim area to find their luggage.

“It’s been a little frustrating but we’re hanging in there,” the Las Vegas resident said. “It said ‘on time’ when we left this morning, so we were hopeful.”

Their Thursday 9:30 a.m. flight out to Denver, Colorado, ended up getting delayed, she said, so they decided to book a flight for later that day. They were on their way to see family for a trip, so they wanted to make sure they got out by Thursday.

Her son Matthew didn’t mind. The 11-year-old aspired to be a pilot, particularly with Southwest, his favorite airline.

“We’re gonna make it work at another hour,” he said with a grin and nod. “Being at the airport doesn’t really bother me too much.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.