Southwest briefly grounds flights
Cancellations held to 12 as airline cites ‘firewall failure’
DALLAS — Southwest Airlines planes were briefly grounded nationwide early Tuesday for what the airline called an intermittent technology issue, leading to thousands of delayed flights just four months after the carrier suffered a much bigger meltdown over the Christmas travel rush.
The hold on departures, lasting less than 30 minutes, was lifted by late morning, 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-based airline said in a statement. “Early this morning, a vendor-supplied firewall went down, and connection to some operational data was unexpectedly lost.”
On the positive side, Southwest had only about a dozen flights canceled, in line with other major airlines, according to FlightAware.
No destination-specific delays were reported by late Tuesday at Bill and Hilary Clinton National Airport in Little Rock, according to the FAA, with airborne delays there being 15 minutes or less. The carrier does not service other Arkansas airports.
Earlier Tuesday, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg retweeted an FAA post about the ground stop, adding: “We are here to ensure passengers have strong protections when airline failures like this affect their plans.”
He referred affected travelers to a Transportation Department checklist of pas
senger rights, and his press secretary noted that “no other airlines experienced disruptions.”
Tuesday’s Southwest delays added to the picture of an airline that has struggled more than most with technology issues.
“It was a 17-minute ground stop. This will have no longlasting affect on Southwest’s reputation,” said Henry Harteveldt, a travel analyst with Atmosphere Research Group. “What matters now for Southwest is getting to the cause and doing all it can to ensure incidents like this don’t occur again.”
Rob Britton, a former American Airlines executive who teaches crisis management at Georgetown University, said the damage from Tuesday’s incident will be minor but will add to the erosion of Southwest’s image.
Britton said Southwest has underinvested in technology while growing rapidly, and the carrier suffers from an “insular culture” that “keeps them from looking outside for solutions.”
In December, Southwest canceled nearly 17,000 flights in a 10-day stretch around Christmas — wrecking holiday travel plans for well over 2 million people — when a winter storm shut down its operations in Denver and Chicago and the airline’s system for rescheduling pilots and flight attendants was overwhelmed.
Those cancellations cost the airline more than $1 billion and led to an ongoing Transportation Department investigation.
The airline’s unions have said they warned management about problems with the crew-scheduling system after a previous meltdown in October 2021.
CEO Robert Jordan has since embarked on a campaign to repair the airline’s damaged reputation. Southwest said last month it will add deicing equipment and increase staffing during winter weather that is cold enough to limit the amount of time that ground workers can stay outside.