Southwest system outage causes 1,700 flight delays, leaving some passengers stranded on runways — latest meltdown has travelers vowing to ditch airline

Southwest Airlines experienced a nationwide system outage on Tuesday morning that caused some cancelations and roughly 1,700 flight delays.

The technical disruption, which lasted approximately an hour and a half, left some passengers stranded on runways.

Disgruntled customers took to Twitter to vent their frustrations with Southwest's performance and potential pattern of unreliability after the airline's earlier meltdown in December that resulted in roughly 16,700 canceled flights.

One Twitter user wrote, "I've had 3 of my last flights delayed by 4 or more hours in the last 3 months. One of them rescheduled and it positively couldn't work for me and I had to pay $140 to make it work. I'm done with SW."

Another user tweeted, "You are no longer my go to - that is for certain. In the past 10 days, I'm 3 for 3 with ridiculous, non weather delays with my flights. I will be canceling my return today and pivoting to United."

According to Southwest, the nationwide outage resulted from a firewall system failure that occurred around 9:45 a.m. and continued for over an hour.

A representative attempting to address the flood of passenger complaints stated that the airline was experiencing "intermittent technology issues."

At 11:10 a.m., the Federal Aviation Administration announced that the halt on Southwest flights had been lifted and service would continue immediately.

The FAA posted on Twitter, "This morning @SouthwestAir experienced a technical issue with one of their internal systems. At the airline's request, the FAA paused Southwest's departures as they resolved the issue. The pause has been lifted and their service has resumed."

Southwest Airlines posted an update on social media announcing that services would resume; however, it did not announce the initial outage. The update provided few details on the cause of the disruption but encouraged passengers to check their flight status.

A 10 a.m. media release from the airline revealed that the outrage resulted from a firewall failure.

"Southwest has resumed operations after temporarily pausing flight activity this morning to work through data connection issues resulting from a firewall failure," the statement read. "Early this morning, a vendor-supplied firewall went down and connection to some operational data was unexpectedly lost. Southwest Teams worked quickly to minimize flight disruptions."

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