04/18/2023

Southwest Passengers Face Delays After Nationwide Grounding

They blamed a third-party vendor firewall

Southwest Airlines planes were grounded nationwide for what the airline called an intermittent technology issue, causing more than 1,700 flight delays Tuesday just four months after the carrier suffered a meltdown over the Christmas travel rush.

The hold on departures was lifted by late morning, shortly after it was announced, according to Southwest and the Federal Aviation Administration, but not before traffic at airports from Denver to New York City backed up.

"Southwest has resumed operations after temporarily pausing flight activity this morning to work through data connection issues resulting from a firewall failure," the Dallas airline said in a prepared statement. "Early this morning, a vendor-supplied firewall went down and connection to some operational data was unexpectedly lost."

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Associated Press.