[punkrex]

What's being skipped over in a lot of reporting is that Southwest has serious issues maintaining ground staff staffing, and has been struggling with that the entire pandemic because they refuse to pay market rate. This means that planes can't be unloaded and turned around in any reasonable amount of time. I gave up completely on southwest after I was stuck on a plane for 4 hours this summer, because of lack of ground crew to unload the planes, and thus planes were stuck on the tarmac.

Add on to that the latest technology woes, the storm was just the thing that tipped over a company that had cut operational capacity to the bone.

[iudqnolq]

A few days ago they declared a "state of emergency" in a few airports, which they're pretty transparently using to squeeze staff.

I don't see any non-bogus reason to, for example, stop accepting doctor's letters from telehealth visits only in cities where they're particularly short staffed.