DALLAS — Earlier this morning, a "technical issue" caused Southwest Airlines (WN) to temporarily halt departures. Now, the airline has resumed operations, according to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Despite the fact that operations have resumed, the interruption may have caused flight delays.

Early Tuesday morning, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a nationwide stop for WN flights due to “equipment issues.” The stoppage caused over 1,500 delays.

At 10:10 AM Central Time, the FAA announced that it had lifted the ground stop as Southwest was able to resolve the issue. The ground stop had been in place for over an hour. According to FlightAware, 36% of Southwest’s scheduled flights were delayed. 

In a Twitter statement the airline stated, “As a result of the intermittent technology issues that we experienced, we should hopefully be resuming our operation as soon as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, but we're hoping to get everyone going ASAP.”

https://twitter.com/FAANews/status/1648343231569035266

A Recurring Glitch in the System

While the ground stop only lasted an hour and WN was able to resolve the technology glitch extremely fast, it comes after a similar system outage that resulted in over 16,700 WN cancellations.

The system outage in late December left 2 million passengers stranded during the holiday season because of severe weather conditions. Furthermore, the airline suffered a US$800m loss in the fourth quarter of 2022.

In response to the December outage, WN vowed to upgrade its technology software, specifically, its crew scheduling software which was unable to handle the many changes to crew assignments because of the severe weather. 

The issues on Tuesday do not seem to be related to the crew scheduling software.

Featured image: Southwest is currently the world's largest operator of the 737 MAX. Photo: Michael Rodeback/Airways