Southwest suffers technology outage; flights held at gates

DALLAS (AP) — Southwest Airlines flights across the country were held up Wednesday while the airline worked to fix technology problems.

[...] the pilots reached the end of their shifts, so passengers waited for a replacement crew.

Airlines have sprawling, overlapping and complicated technology systems, and even brief outages can cause thousands of passengers to be stranded for hours.

Last October, an outage caused about 800 Southwest flights to be delayed and forced employees to issue tickets and boarding passes by hand.