Dallas.- Southwest Airlines planes were temporarily grounded Tuesday morning due to an “intermittent technical problem,” the company reported, causing more than 1,500 flight delays, just four months after the airline suffered a collapse in the holiday season.
Southwest and the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) reported shortly after that the pause had been lifted.
“Southwest resumed operations after temporarily pausing flight activity this morning to address data connection issues that resulted from a firewall failure,” the Dallas airline said in a statement. “Early this morning, a vendor-provided firewall went down and the connection to some operational data was unexpectedly lost.”
Earlier, Southwest announced on Twitter that it had asked the FAA to suspend takeoffs due to “intermittent” technical issues, and that it hoped to resume as soon as possible.
The FAA said only that Southwest requested to pause the flights, and referred any questions to the Dallas-based airline.
In December, Southwest canceled nearly 17,000 flights in the height of the holiday season due to bad weather and its crew scheduling system being overwhelmed. The cancellations cost the airline more than $1 billion and are being investigated by the Department of Transportation.
