Tech Issues Causes Southwest Airlines to Briefly Halt Flights

Early Tuesday morning, Southwest Airlines had to pause its departures due to technical problems leading to thousands of delayed flights, CNBC reported.

Dan Landson, a spokesperson for Southwest Airlines, claimed “a vendor-supplied firewall went down and connection to some operational data was unexpectedly lost.”

By 11:35 a.m. the Federal Aviation Administration had lifted the ground stop for the airline, but by then many travel plans had been interrupted. According to FlightAware, a flight-tracking website, more than 1,728 flights or 41% of its schedule.

Tuesday’s issue comes after Southwest faced a major disaster during the busiest time of the year. After a massive winter storm struck, many airlines were forced to delay and cancel flights, however Southwest experienced massive flight disruptions and problems with its scheduling software.

Most other airlines were able to recover from the storm quickly, but Southwest was forced to cancel thousands of flights for multiple days in a  row, triggering mass chaos and prompting a federal government investigation.