Southwest is broken.
My sister won't make it out to visit as planned, but at least she never managed to leave. I feel so bad for the thousands stranded far from home with no help from Southwest. It took the other airlines about a day to recover from the storms, but now almost all Southwest flights are cancelled through the rest of the year. Thousands and thousands of flights. And a lot of these people impacted are less-experienced travelers, trying to get home or visit family on a discount airline over the holidays. Just really sad stories on the Southwest social media, which the company has just stopped responding to. And of course prices for alternative options have shot up with the demand. My sister hasn't flown anywhere in many years, we were walking her through the check-in and boarding processes, fortunately she didn't make it out of Hartford - but did spend about 8 hours at the airport there. It would have cost thousands of dollars to get her home through another airline if she managed to leave a day earlier.
Interesting info allegedly from a Southwest employee on a reddit thread. It's a crew scheduling software issue. And of course the nature of things cascading after that means there's no customer service help available, everything is shut down. Companies are running leaner than ever staffing wise and it was just a matter of time before shit truly hit the fan for an airline.
PSA from a SWA employee since the company won’t give any info : SouthwestAirlines
(Original post there now deleted, probably smart if that really was an employee).