OAN Geraldyn Berry
UPDATED 3:46 PM – Tuesday, April 18, 2023
After experiencing “intermittent technology issues” that temporarily hampered its operations, Southwest Airlines resumed all departures on Tuesday morning.
A Southwest spokesperson said in a statement that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) paused Southwest departures at the airline’s request on Tuesday morning, while the company worked to resolve “data connection issues resulting from a firewall failure.”
“Early this morning, a vendor-supplied firewall went down and connection to some operational data was unexpectedly lost,” the statement said.
Service had resumed by 8:10 a.m. Pacific time, according to the FAA, even if the impacts of the suspension were still delaying departure schedules.
According to the flight tracking service “FlightAware”, at least 2,192 Southwest aircraft were delayed in the United States by 2:25 p.m., accounting for more than half of its scheduled departures.
Immediately following the hiccups, Chief Commercial Officer Ryan Green vowed that the company “would do everything we can, and work day and night to repair our relationship with you.” Southwest announced that it would spend over $1 billion to update its information technology (IT) infrastructure.
This comes as Southwest is still in the works of trying to repair its reputation after an operational meltdown in December led to nearly 17,000 canceled flights and displaced millions of passengers during the holidays.
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