Grounded travelers took to Twitter to share news of delayed or canceled flights and also shared images of crowded airport terminals.
Southwest told Newsweek it is “in the process of resuming normal operations after a brief pause in our flight activity” because of “intermittent performance issues with our network connectivity.”
“Our teams are working quickly to minimize flight disruptions and customer impact,” Southwest spokesman Chris Mainz said. “We appreciate our customers’ patience as we work to get them to their destinations. We ask that travelers use Southwest.com to check flight status or consult a Southwest Airlines customer service agent at the airport for assistance with travel needs.”
Mainz also said Southwest proactively canceled 500 flights because of the outage and is “working with those customers to get them to their destinations as quickly as possible.”
Southwest resumed regular operations by 2 p.m. ET, according to Flight Radar, a global flight-tracking service.
The website Down Detector tracked outage reports for Southwest on Monday and Tuesday. Reports of delays on Tuesday began to spike around 12:30 p.m. ET. After 2 p.m., the reports began to drop.
Southwest replied to some frustrated travelers on Twitter earlier Tuesday afternoon, saying the airline was experiencing technical problems that were affecting tier phones. The airline is asking customers to direct-message their account with flight information to get further assistance.
More than 1,400 flights across the country were delayed Monday night. Southwest blamed the problems on its third-party weather data provider. A spokesman said the system “experienced intermittent performance issues” that prevented necessary weather information from being sent to flight crews.
“While Southwest Teams and the vendor worked to restore connectivity, we implemented a ground stop to protect the safety of our crews and customers,” Southwest Airlines’ Dan Landson said in a statement.
The problem began at around 9 p.m. ET, and flights were able to resume by midnight.
Delta Air Lines and Alaska Airlines were also experiencing technical problems affecting their booking sites and apps on Tuesday.
“Delta teams are working to quickly address a technical issue that is making it difficult for customers to purchase flights on delta.com, the Fly Delta app, and through our Reservations Call Center,” Delta said in a statement to ABC News. “The ability to check in for flights is not affected. We apologize to our customers for any inconvenience this is causing.”
This story was updated with comments from a Southwest Airlines spokesman.
