Southwest Network Security failure grounds flights and are now delayed

Norm must be rolling in his grave .........

From the Cyber Security side of the world it looks like the failure of a single piece of hardware, a firewall. With no redundancy? The southwest Executives have IT on such a tight budget they do not have critical hardware redundancy. The Executives need to be fired. How do you run a large airline without resilient systems? After their Christmas melt down there is no blaming this on workers and hardware.

i bet there is more to the story they are not telling we will never know what really happening.

I understand that several of their AOL accounts went down at the same time.

What a shame that a billion dollar business is brought to its knees due to a computer failure. What did SW do before computers???

The more we depend on computer software the more it lets us down...

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!!

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.

Sry didn't see your post. Mine was delayed. Like a Southwest flight.

After the Tuesday debacle, SW systems were obviously still not communicating with each other properly. I was scheduled out of MDW on Wednesday night at 8pm. Flights appeared to be running on-time, so I was preparing for my hour commute in from the 'burbs when DM's started rolling in to my phone. 5:34pm, your flight now departs at 8:31pm; 5:36pm, your flight now departs at 11:15pm; 7:07pm, your flight now departs at 11:45pm; 8:57pm, your flight now departs at 12:15am; Each DM referred me to southwest.com/status, which continued to reflect the original 8pm departure time. At this point I decided to call Customer Service to see what was going on. After listening to the delightful music for some time, the agent picked-up the call, and after I advised her the reason for my call and the DM's indicating the departure delayed by over 4 hours, she said "Oh no, the flight is due to depart at 9:54pm. As there was no way I could make it to MDW and get to the gate in 45 minutes. Her comment was that they still expected people to arrive at the airport as normal for the flight. I rescheduled for the next day. At 9:39pm I received a further DM advising that the flight would now depart at 12:45am.
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.

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.

Southwest The "Wal-Mart" of Airlines. Do we expect anything less?

Could not have happened to a better bunch!