Southwest Airlines flights delayed after brief ground stop
Southwest Airlines just had another IT-related meltdown, albeit very briefly.
All Southwest Airlines flights were grounded nationwide on Tuesday.
The airline cited ‘data connection issues resulting from a firewall failure.’
The Federal Aviation Administration said Southwest requested a ground stop on flights.
The ground stop has just been lifted but some delays are expected in the short term due to the build-up of grounded flights.
“Southwest has resumed operations after temporarily pausing flight activity this morning,” the carrier said.
“A vendor-supplied firewall went down and connection to some operational data was unexpectedly lost.”
“We ask that travelers use Southwest.com to check flight status or visit a customer service agent at the airport for assistance.”
The ground stop lasted less than one hour.
The temporary outage and flight delays seems to be a tiny glitch compared to Southwest’s epic failure at Christmas.
Thousands of flights were scrapped over several days causing chaos for customers.
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Editor for TravelMole North America and Asia pacific regions. Ray is a highly experienced (15+ years) skilled journalist and editor predominantly in travel, hospitality and lifestyle working with a huge number of major market-leading brands. He has also cover in-depth news, interviews and features in general business, finance, tech and geopolitical issues for a select few major news outlets and publishers.
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