Originally Posted by remedy

A brief power outage yesterday morning at Northwest Airlines' operations center near Minneapolis caused the carrier's computer systems to shut down, forcing it to delay scores of departing planes world-wide and later to cancel more than 200 flights.

The nation's fourth-largest airline said power was restored at about 9 a.m. Central time after a 45-minute failure and that flight-related computer systems were returning to normal later in the day. But as a result, the airline delayed departing flights for more than an hour, causing tie-ups at its hub airports because arriving flights couldn't go to gates until the departing planes were cleared to take off.

The disruptions cascaded throughout the day, causing further delays because aircraft and crews were out of position, and passengers missed their connections.

A Northwest Airlines spokeswoman said the cause of the outage was under investigation. She would say only that the internal power failure occurred at an airline facility. But a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration said the airline informed the government that the problem occurred in its system-operations control center, the nerve system for flight operations, dispatch, scheduling, meteorology and other critical functions.

Northwest said flights that were en route at the time of the outage weren't affected and landed without incident. Departures were returning to normal late yesterday, but the carrier, based in St. Paul, Minn., said it anticipated cancellations and delays until the evening.

The airline said it allowed customers who were booked on domestic or international flights yesterday to reschedule without financial penalty through Saturday. It also said it was working with other carriers to accommodate Northwest customers. As of yesterday afternoon, Northwest had canceled more than 60 of its flights and expected that number to grow. Additionally, more than 150 flights by its regional airline partners also were scrubbed.