Southwest Airlines cancels 500 flights after system issues continue for 2nd day

HOUSTON – The Federal Aviation Administration issued a nationwide ground stop for Southwest Airlines Tuesday afternoon due to computer issues.

The airlines said it is aware of its system issues and working to resolve them.

The Federal Aviation Administration issued a temporary nationwide ground stop at the request of Southwest Airlines as the company resolve its reservation computer issues.

Southwest Airlines released the following statement:

“Southwest is in the process of resuming normal operations after a brief pause in our flight activity resulting from intermittent performance issues with our network connectivity Tuesday afternoon. Our Teams are working quickly to minimize flight disruptions and Customer impact. 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.

Today, we’ve proactively canceled roughly 500 flights due to the outage, and we’re working with those customers to get them to their destinations as quickly as possible.”

The computer disruption comes a day after a reported “nationwide network issue” with Southwest Airline’s computer systems. The issue caused delays of about two dozen flights to Houston’s Hobby Airport Monday evening. The technical issue was reportedly the company’s weather monitoring system crashing, but the company did not confirm that specific piece of software as being the reason for the grounded flights.

Local impact

Twenty flights have been canceled at Hobby Airport, 15 departures and five arrivals, according to Houston Airport System.

KPRC 2 is checking with George Bush Intercontinental Airport for canceled or delayed flights.

In other airports, people are seeing lines. NBC’s Gabe Gutierrez shared this video of lines in Portland.

This is a developing story.


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