Through Friday’s global IT outage, it started to become clear that the enterprise-level digital signage networks most affected by the CrowdStrike security update boo-boo seemed to be airports and airlines, but U.S. carrier Southwest Airlines screens were minimally affected because the carrier, somewhat astonishingly, is using versions of Windows coded in the 1990s.
Numerous IT-focused publications are noting that Southwest, the fourth biggest airline in the US, is using Windows 3.1, which was released in 1992. The operating system is too old to support and therefore get security updates from CrowdStrike, so those devices were unaffected by the faulty one that blue-screened millions of screens, including flight and date information screens for airlines and airports at numerous airports in the US and globally.
It turns out Southwest also has company systems that run on Windows 95, which older folks will know came out in 1995.
The airline has been criticized for running on such ancient operating systems, but as IT writers have noted, those mostly forgotten operating systems made Friday and the weekend much easier than for Southwest than it was for rival carriers like Delta and United, who were both still in the process of trying to restore normal services and operations.