Southwest Airlines had long delays across the country. Here’s why

Southwest Airlines flights were delayed for hours Monday night due to a weather data outage, affecting travel across the country.

A Southwest Airlines spokesperson said in a statement to NPR that the system “experienced intermittent performance issues” that stopped flight crews from receiving any weather information for flights.

• This information is necessary to fly across the country, Southwest said.
• “While Southwest teams and the vendor worked to restore connectivity, we implemented a ground stop to protect the safety of our crews and customers,” Dan Landson, spokesperson for Southwest, told NPR.

Delays for Southwest Airlines

Per FlightAware data, there were more than 1,400 delays to flights, which is more than any other airline the service tracks.

Passengers were delayed for about three hours on Monday night, according to Business Insider. Most flights were grounded at 7 p.m. MT. They were picked up around 10 p.m. MT.

• “We’ve resumed normal flight operations after our third-party weather data provider experienced intermittent performance issues Monday evening preventing transmission of weather information that is required to safely operate our aircraft,” Southwest said in the statement to Insider.