A computer outage has caused flight delays this morning as it affected operations of at least five airlines nationwide. According to reports, the same outage affected United, Delta, Alaska, Southwest, and JetBlue. The source was apparently a vendor that services multiple carriers.
A spokesperson for Southwest Airlines said in a statement provided to Gizmodo that the outage was due to a “a vendor that services multiple carriers with data used in flight planning.” The outage delayed flight operations at busy hubs such as New York, Boston, Atlanta, and Detroit.
“A brief third-party technology issue that prevented some Delta Connection flights from being dispatched on time this morning has been resolved,” said a spokesperson for Delta, adding that it’s not expected that this issue will lead to cancellations for passengers. Southwest cautioned its customers that it expects scattered flight delays and that its customers should keep an eye on its website for the latest updates on specific flights.
The Federal Aviation Administration later told CBS News that the issues were because of a flight planning weight and balance program called Aerodata. It added that mainline operations and regional operations were impacted to “varying degrees.” It’s unclear if other airlines’ operations were affected as a result of this outage as well.
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