Southwest Airlines planes were held up from taking off nationwide due to what the airline called an intermittent technology issue, causing more than 1,500 flights to be delayed on Tuesday, just four months after the airline collapsed during the Christmas rush .
Southwest and the Federal Aviation Administration said late morning on the East Coast that the break had been lifted."Southwest has resumed operations after temporarily suspending flight activity this morning to resolve data connection issues caused by a firewall outage," the Dallas-based airline said in a prepared statement. "Early this morning, a vendor-provided firewall failed and some operational data was unexpectedly disconnected.
"By late morning on the East Coast, Southwest was responsible for more than half of all flight delays nationwide, but the airline had canceled fewer than a dozen flights, according to FlightAware.In December, Southwest canceled nearly 17,000 flights over the Christmas holidays due to bad weather and an overloaded crew scheduling system.
Those cancellations have cost the airline more than $1 billion and are being investigated by the Department of Transportation.