The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) took to social media in the form of Twitter to report that Southwest Airlines had requested them to ground their flights due to technical problems. According to FlightAware, Southwest Airlines had to delay 1,820 flights which represents 43% of its schedule.
Continuing in the social media vein, Southwest customers took to complaining about the delays to which the airline responded in its own tweets saying the airline was having intermittent technology issues. Of course, they hoped for the best in that operations would resume back to normal quickly and called the problem intermittent technology issues.
The request for grounding came from Southwest at 10:30 am EST and was lifted 40 minutes later by the FAA at 11:10 am and was fully cancelled by 12:00 noon.
The cause of the technical glitch was due to a firewall issue within Southwest Airlines internal computer programming. The firewall supplied by a vender failed and caused data connection problems resulting in some operational data being lost.
A History of Cancellations
Four months ago, Southwest Airlines experienced another flight schedule crisis when over 16,700 flights were cancelled during the busy holiday travel season between December 20 to December 29, 2022. That was around half of the airline’s entire flight schedule. The airline claimed that this computer meltdown occurred because of changes it had made to its computer systems that handled staff scheduling.
This led to an investigation by the US Department of Transportation as well as a hearing being held by the Senate Committee. The result of that investigation was that Southwest Airlines had failed to keep up with updating its technology. This was compounded with a lack of support in attempting to recover flights that had been cancelled. This was followed by the airline providing an action plan to prevent subsequent technical crises.