Southwest Airlines service has resumed after flights at airports across the country were temporarily paused due to an "intermittent technology issue," the airline and the Federal Aviation Administration said Tuesday.
"Southwest has resumed operations after temporarily pausing flight activity this morning to work through data connection issues resulting from a firewall failure," a statement to NBC 5 from the airline read.
"Early this morning, a vendor-supplied firewall went down and connection to some operational data was unexpectedly lost. Southwest Teams worked quickly to minimize flight disruptions ... We appreciate the patience of our Customers and Employees during this morning’s brief disruption," the statement continued.
"As a result of the intermittent technology issues that we experienced, we should hopefully be resuming our operation as soon as possible," a tweet from Southwest Airlines read Tuesday. "We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, but we're hoping to get everyone going ASAP."
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The tweet is one of several Southwest Airlines wrote as many travelers took to social media to indicate they were recently informed their flights had been delayed for various reasons pertaining to an "outage."
"@Southwestair flight delayed because of a system outage," one tweet read.
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"We are sitting at the gate with a 'systemwide paperwork issue' and delayed at least 30 minutes - why would you not tell passengers before they boarded?" another said. "There was no indication of any delay before we sat down. Terrible customer service."
According to one traveler out of Denver, passengers were informed that "there is a systemwide computer crash and all flights are grounded."
A 9:36 a.m. Tweet from the Federal Aviation Administration read that "Southwest Airlines requested the FAA pause the airline’s departures." An alert from the agency referred to the pause as a "nationwide ground stop."
At 10:10 a.m. the FAA tweeted that the "pause" had been lifted, and the Southwest Airlines service had resumed.
At Midway International Airport in Chicago, multiple Southwest flights listed as "Scheduled-Delayed."
At of 9:37 a.m., Flight Aware listed 795 delays and 3 cancellations for Southwest nationwide.
The delays come nearly four months after thousands of Southwest Airlines travelers over Christmas time experienced canceled flights with little notice, days-long delays and lost luggage.
This story will be updated as more information becomes available.
