Last week, much of the digital world came to a halt and stopped working because an update caused Microsoft’s Windows operating system to crash and display a blue screen on millions of devices. Hospitals, schools and airports were among those affected. But one airline was spared the chaos, unlike the others. And many say that’s because it’s still using an ancient operating system, but that’s not the case.
On July 19, millions of computers and other Windows devices crashed and stopped working worldwide. It later turned out that Crowdstrike, a major cybersecurity company, had released an update that didn’t work and broke everything for hours. And as is common on the internet these days, people started making jokes about it and making up stories, some of which went viral. For example, many people still believe that the Las Vegas Sphere crashed during the Crowdstrike event. (It was not like that.)
But perhaps the most common claim was Reported by several media and was spread online as truth was that Southwest Airlines in the US avoided all the Crowdstrike chaos because their systems are still running on Windows 3.1. This is not correct, although Southwest Airlines is actually using some older software that should probably be updated.
As emphasized by OS News, When you look into this story, you find that many places quote a tweet that went viral claims Southwest is still using Windows 3.1. This person later confirmed that They trollbut that did not stop the claim from spreading. Later, people discovered an article from 2023 that compares Southwest’s internal software to Windows 3.1 and suggests that it is almost as old. But it never says that Southwest Strictly speaking still using Windows 3.1.
Dig a little deeper and you you will find an article from December 2022 out of The Dallas Morning News all at the time when Southwest Airlines’ systems crashed over the holidays. The article and others since then clearly place the blame on the airline’s outdated software – SkySolver and Crew Web Access. The article mentions that these programs look like they were designed for Windows 95.
Since then, the false claim has been circulating that Southwest uses Windows 95. This claim was then backed up by a viral tweet and picked up by some media outlets.
However, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that Southwest is actually still using Windows 3.1. Sure, the software they use for flight scheduling and employee management looks old and has apparently been around since about 2007. That’s true and scary. But no, Southwest couldn’t avoid the Windows crash because they’re using an operating system from 1992. Why was Southwest able to largely avoid the chaos of July 19? Simple. They reportedly do not use Crowdstrike.
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