Southwest flights resume after temporary halt as a result of technical challenge By Reuters

By Rajesh Kumar Singh and Aishwarya Nair

(Reuters) -Southwest Airways Co’s flights resumed operation Tuesday after a one-hour nationwide stoppage, which the U.S. airline stated was brought on by a firewall failure.

The Dallas-based service stated a vendor-supplied firewall went down Tuesday morning and connection to some operational knowledge was “unexpectedly” misplaced, forcing it to briefly pause all flights.

Knowledge from flight tracker FlightAware reveals 43% of Southwest’s flights are delayed, to this point. Lots of the delayed flights are anticipated to be canceled later within the day.

The airline requested these whose flights are canceled to request a refund.

Shares of the airline fell 1.4% in mid-day commerce on Tuesday.

Southwest has been below fireplace ever since a staffing disaster as a result of unhealthy climate in the course of the Christmas holidays overwhelmed its crew scheduling software program, disrupting journey plans for 2 million clients.

The vacation disruption led to over 16,700 flight cancellations, costing the corporate greater than $1 billion.

A pointy rebound in journey demand from the pandemic lows has uncovered the fragility of the aviation system.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) needed to halt flights nationwide in January as a result of a programs outage.

The Nationwide Transportation Security Board is investigating a collection of significant shut calls, together with a close to collision in January between FedEx (NYSE:) and Southwest planes in Austin, Texas, the place the jets got here inside 100 toes of one another, and a runway incursion at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport involving an American Airways (NASDAQ:) aircraft.

The near-miss incidents prompted the FAA final month to challenge a security alert to airways, pilots and others concerning the “want for continued vigilance and a spotlight to mitigation of security dangers.”