Unions seek ouster of Southwest CEO after IT breakdown

DALLAS (AP) — Two major unions at Southwest Airlines are demanding that the carrier replace its CEO because of the technology outage that caused the airline to cancel or delay thousands of flights in July.

[...] it will lose money from a "couple hundred thousand people" whose flights were canceled and from refunds to stranded passengers, he said.

Union President Jon Weaks said the company had focused too much on controlling costs and buying back its own shares and not enough to upgrade "critically outdated IT infrastructure and flight operations."

Southwest's senior vice president of labor relations, Randy Babbitt, said union demands were just part of the contract-bargaining process.

Independent experts in information technology said the outage was probably more complex than a single failed router.

The router triggered a chain reaction that should not have happened, said Doron Pinhas, chief technology officer of Continuity Software Inc. He said it was likely that Southwest didn't test its system adequately to see what would happen when that part failed.