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Southwest Airlines was largely unaffected by the CrowdStrike update yesterday (more here) that crippled airlines, hotels, banks, and more because it was running such an old version of Microsoft Windows. The fourth largest airline in the United States is running Windows 3.1, which launched in 1992 and did not receive the update from CrowdStrike.
Other airlines (American, Delta, United, and others) were impacted by the CrowdStrike update and had to ground their fleets when the IT snafu occurred. Systems like pilot and fleet scheduling, maintenance, ticketing, and more were all down. The update did not impact aircraft systems and planes that were flying during the update did not see any impact.
Southwest is often criticized for its outdated systems. Aside from running Windows 3.1, its employee scheduling system is operated with Windows 95. This outage might encourage Southwest to continue holding off on software upgrades. It’s funny that staying out of date with its software might have put Southwest in the best position of the major US carriers as it was able to operate as close to normal as possible yesterday while others completely melted down.
🤣🤣🤣 https://t.co/mkKBPwEiWe
— Trevor (@tmount) July 20, 2024
Anthony’s Take: Southwest unintentionally kept its operation running by refusing to upgrade software. It’s pretty amazing that the airline is still running software that was released 32 years ago.
(Image Credits: Wikimedia Commons and Owen Lystrup.)
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Advertiser & Editorial Disclosure: The Bulkhead Seat earns an affiliate commission for anyone approved through the links above This compensation may impact how and where links appear on this site. We work to provide the best publicly available offers to our readers. We frequently update them, but this site does not include all available offers. Opinions, reviews, analyses & recommendations are the author’s alone, and have not been reviewed, endorsed, or approved by any of these entities.
4 comments
Does the airline still have the windows installation floppy 💾 disks?
It didn’t affect anyone who doesn’t use CrowdStrike.
You’re citing a parody site.
Sometimes it pays to not install an update. I know some of my apple updates really mess up my iPhone.