Southwest Airlines service disrupted by system outage

Southwest Airline passengers are being advised to expect long lines at counters as Southwest recovers from a system outage that disrupted flight operations Wednesday night.

Southwest issued the following statement Thursday morning:

"Southwest Airlines reports that most systems are back online Thursday morning, following performance issues with multiple technology systems as a result of an outage Wednesday afternoon.  As of 6:30 a.m. Central Daylight Time [7:30 a.m. Philadelphia time], we have cancelled more than 220 flights on Thursday and continue to manage the flight disruptions created across our system. We are focused on getting customers and their luggage safely to their travel destinations and apologize to our customers whose travel plans are impacted. Customers who are booked to travel should check flight status information on Southwest.com and plan to arrive to the airport early, as long lines may occur. Flexible rebooking accommodation will be available to customers through Sunday.

"As a result of the technical issues we canceled nearly 700 flights Wednesday and hundreds more were delayed. Employees worked around issues with primary systems and utilized back-up procedures to get as many customers and checked luggage to their intended destinations as we worked to fix the system.

"We'll continue to work individually with our affected customers to make this right."‎