Southwest Airlines’ December meltdown came after years of tech failures

Southwest suffered more than a dozen technology glitches, outages and meltdowns, even before the 2022 holiday season when it canceled 16,700 flights over 10 days. Time and time again over the last decade, leaders at the Dallas-based carrier apologized to customers and said the company hadn’t lived up to its reputation built over 50 years, according to a Dallas Morning News examination of Southwest Airlines’ operational and technology problems. What led to the company’s epic December failure will be in the spotlight Thursday when the company’s chief operating officer Andrew Watterson faces questions at a U.S. Senate committee hearing. He’ll testify along with pilots union president Casey Murray, a critic of Southwest’s attention to previous technology problems. Over the last decade when issues arose, company leaders, including former CEO Gary Kelly and current CEO Bob Jordan, pledged technology upgrades and promised that new, better systems were on the way. Few are as familiar with those problems as Jordan, who joined Southwest’s fledgling computer programming team in 1988 from Hewlett-Packard and has been closely tied to technology as he climbed the corporate ladder to CE in the summer of 2021. Jordan spent six years heading the company’s technology teams and hired the company’s first chief technology officer in 2008 before leading the physical and digital integration of one of the company’s biggest acquisitions in its history, the $1.4b deal to buy AirTran in 2011. Story has more.<br/>