Why isn’t Southwest affected by the CrowdStrike/Microsoft outage?

Southwest has taken heat in the past for not upgrading the operating system it uses for its computers, but those tides have suddenly changed. Now it looks like the airline’s reluctance to update its systems has come in handy.

The world awoke on Friday morning to chaos as an issue with a software update from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike crashed Windows computers around the world. Many major airlines including Delta, American, United, Spirit, Frontier and Allegiant were all reporting issues with their computer systems on Friday, leading to thousands of canceled flights and tens of thousands of delayed ones. But Southwest reported that its operations were completely unaffected.

That’s because major portions of the airline’s computer systems are still using Windows 3.1, a 32-year-old version of Microsoft’s computer operating software. It’s so old that the CrowdStrike issue doesn’t affect it so Southwest is still operating as normal. It’s typically not a good idea to wait so long to update, but in this one instance Southwest has done itself a favor.