June 15, 2021 | 2:36pm | Updated June 15, 2021 | 4:33pm
Southwest Airlines grounded flights across the country Tuesday for the second time in less than 24 hours, amid reports of nationwide computer issues.
Air travelers took to Twitter by the thousands with reports of what airline staff reportedly told them was a computer system outage — hours after “intermittent performance issues” with a third-party weather app forced a similar group stop Monday night.
“We are aware of system issues and are working quickly to resolve. We will share more info soon,” Southwest posted on its official Twitter account at 2 p.m. Tuesday.
Airline operations resumed shortly before 4 p.m., Southwest said in a statement.
The carrier attributed Tuesday’s meltdown to “intermittent performance issues with… network connectivity,” and said it had “proactively canceled” about 500 flights because of the disruption.
“We’re working with those Customers to get them to their destinations as quickly as possible,” said spokesman Chris Mainz.
The shutdown came after a glitch Monday night prevented “transmission of weather information that is required to safely operate our aircraft,” the airline told Fox Business.
It was not immediately clear whether the two incidents were related.
Southwest flyers expressed confusion on Twitter. Many said the airline informed them their flights were canceled and reported getting cut off from customer services after waiting hours on the line.
sitting in the airport with 3 kids waiting to go home! Was told to wait an hour and after that they couldn’t help us. One of the worst southwest experiences I’ve had this year. Last month we sat on a plane that had “tray issues” for two hours. Causing a 3hour delay
— Ruby Flores (@3xkeiki) June 15, 2021
Define “soon”. First, delayed nearly an hour before we took off, indicating an issue. And now sitting at destination on plane just waiting to get off this flight.
— Matt Larsen (@mattlarsen23) June 15, 2021
my whole family is stuck in denver and need to get back to baltimore today. no one is helping. what are we supposed to do
— robs (@mynamesrobin) June 15, 2021
“We have a flight scheduled to leave out of GEG (flight 5530) today @ 1:05 and it is suddenly showing as canceled–is this a ‘system issue’ or is it actually canceled?” user @BabaYagaBeads replied to Southwest’s tweet.
“Yo @SouthwestAir WTF!?. You cancel my flight to PHX and every other non stop?” asked user @TaylorGelbrich. “And my calls can’t even go through to customer service. WHAT GIVES?!”
