DALLAS – Southwest Airlines paused all departing flights nationwide for about a half hour Tuesday morning due to “internal technical issues,” the FAA said.
“Southwest has resumed operations after temporarily pausing flight activity this morning to work through data connection issues resulting from a firewall failure,” Southwest spokesman Dan Landson said in a statement. “Early this morning, a vendor-supplied firewall went down and connection to some operational data was unexpectedly lost.”
Southwest said it was working to connect passengers to flights and that anyone traveling on the airline today should check their flight status and times.
“Southwest has resumed operations after temporarily pausing flight activity this morning to work through data connection issues,” Southwest said in a statement on its website Tuesday morning. “We offer our heartfelt apologies to customers whose journey with us today might be delayed.”
Southwest, which is the nation’s largest domestic carrier, has already delayed about 30% of its flights for Tuesday, about 1,500 in all, according to Flightaware.com. Southwest has about 4,130 flights scheduled for Tuesday, according to Cirium.
The outage happened around 9:30 a.m. Tuesday morning and lasted about 30 minutes before the problem was apparently fixed and the FAA was notified to resume flights.
“Southwest Airlines requested the FAA pause the airline’s departures,” the Federal Aviation Administration tweeted Tuesday at 9:36 a.m.
“Southwest Airlines pause for its departures has been fully canceled,” the FAA tweeted about 30 minutes later. “Earlier this morning, Southwest requested that FAA pause Southwest departures due to an internal technical issue at Southwest.”
Southwest is still recovery from a December operational meltdown in which it canceled 16,700 flights during the holidays after a winter storm overwhelmed its crew rescheduling systems.
