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Southwest Network Security failure grounds flights and are now delayed
Southwest Airlines said flight delays Tuesday morning were the result of “data connection issues resulting from a firewall failure,” a problem that led to a brief ground stop. The Federal Aviation Administration lifted the ground stop for Southwest Airlines flights after earlier issuing the order, citing “equipment issues.” In a tweet at 11:35 a.m. Southwest said it had resumed operations. “Early this morning, a vendor-supplied firewall went down and connection to some operational data was… (www.cnn.com) More...Sort type: [Top] [Newest]
i bet there is more to the story they are not telling we will never know what really happening.
Firewall's fault. I was working fine and then bam, it went bad. REALLY?? Oh and it came from a vendor so it's not SW fault. Going down the drain quickly Southwest. Never trust a bean counter!!
Southwest used to have such high ratings. They sure seem to be doing everything possible to destroy that reputation. Kind of like Boeing after its acquisition of M-D and putting their bean counters in charge. Destroyed the reputation of probably the finest airplane builder in the world. Southwest is doing the exact same thing; casting aside what made them great for bonuses and profit.
The more we depend on computer software the more it lets us down...
As someone with decades in Network Engineering and Security and years working in the air transport industry, some of the comments here are incredibly ignorant. While I have no internal details about this issue, it appears this has NOTHING to do with Southwest IT or a "network security failure". The FlightAware headline is clickbait, at best.
From the article - "Early this morning, a vendor-supplied firewall went down and connection to some operational data was unexpectedly lost,”. This tells me this is a point-to-point connection to a third-party application, and that the firewall on the Southwest end blew up for some reason. A device that SW had no control over. I've dealt with many of these types of connections over the years, and while it sucks not to have any access to the device, sometimes you have no choice in the matter. The same goes for the 'redundancy' comments. There are a lot of reasons why there might not have been redundant connections. Again, not ideal, but it may not be something that SW has any control over.
From the article - "Early this morning, a vendor-supplied firewall went down and connection to some operational data was unexpectedly lost,”. This tells me this is a point-to-point connection to a third-party application, and that the firewall on the Southwest end blew up for some reason. A device that SW had no control over. I've dealt with many of these types of connections over the years, and while it sucks not to have any access to the device, sometimes you have no choice in the matter. The same goes for the 'redundancy' comments. There are a lot of reasons why there might not have been redundant connections. Again, not ideal, but it may not be something that SW has any control over.
Further, the following night, I took no chances, and arrived at MDW in plenty of time. Things looked promising. The aircraft was at the gate, the gate agents were ready, advising that the flight was going to be full, etc. Just after 7:30pm we were advised that boarding would commence shortly, and the notification screens were flashing "now boarding". Every body was lined up like good soldiers awaiting further instructions. Eventually we were advised that unfortunately there would be a delay as the crew "were in the airport but had not yet arrived at the gate". Needless to say, things went downhill from that point, and we eventually did not land at SRQ until after 1pm, 1 1/2 hours late.
I would have expected many apologies from everyone involved for the delay, but it appeared that the employees really didn't care how inconvenienced everyone was.
Certainly not the way to run an airline.