Technical glitches disrupted Southwest Airlines flights across the country Tuesday, including at the Atlanta airport.
After a brief ground stop, flights resumed by late morning. But the effects of the disruption reverberated for thousands of passengers.
More than 1,900 Southwest flights were delayed by mid-afternoon Tuesday, according to FlightAware.com, amounting to more than 45% of the airline’s flights for the day. That included nearly 100 Southwest flight delays at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. A limited number of Southwest flights were canceled nationally.
The Dallas-based carrier, which is the second-largest airline at Hartsfield-Jackson, posted on Twitter Tuesday morning that it “had to implement a ground stop as a result of intermittent issues.”
Just after 11:30 a.m., Southwest said it had resumed flights and was working to restore operations and accommodate disrupted customers “as quickly as possible.”
The Federal Aviation Administration also posted an update, saying Southwest experienced a technical issue with one of its internal systems and requested the ground stop. The pause was lifted for the airline’s service to resume.
In a statement on the cause of the disruption, Southwest said a firewall supplied by a vendor went down “and connection to some operational data was unexpectedly lost.” As a result, the airline paused flights Tuesday morning to “work through data connection issues.”
In response to customers raising issues on Twitter on Tuesday morning, Southwest also posted that it had intermittent issues with its website and mobile app.
The airline said on its website Tuesday morning that its system to show updates for upcoming trips was also “experiencing delays.”
Southwest and other airlines have had other technical outages disrupting flights in the past, and Tuesday’s disruption follows Southwest’s operational meltdown over the holidays.
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