WASHINGTON — Southwest Airlines has resumed flights after temporarily asking the Federal Aviation Administration to "pause" all of its departures Tuesday morning as the airline worked to resolve an issue with one of their internal systems, the FAA said.
Around 11:10 a.m. Eastern, the FAA said the pause had been lifted and Southwest's service has resumed.
In a statement, the airline said it grounded flights nationwide so its teams could "work through data connection issues resulting from a firewall failure."
"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," the airline said.
While Southwest flights are once again taking off, the temporary pause will likely impact departure times throughout the day.
According to flight tracking website FlightAware, more than 2,160 Southwest flights have been delayed nationwide, as of Tuesday afternoon on the East Coast. That accounts for 52% of Southwest's schedule, according to the FlightAware.
Other airlines do not appear to be impacted.
"Technical errors are unexpected and inconvenient for all, and you have our sincere apologies," the airline's official Twitter account responded in a tweet about the nationwide ground stop.
Back in December, Southwest Airlines suffered a massive breakdown that led to the cancelation of nearly 17,000 flights in 10 days before resuming a normal schedule. Last month, Southwest's CEO again pushed back against the view that those issues were caused by a failure to invest enough money in crew-scheduling technology, instead blaming extremely cold weather that forced it to stop flying at some airports.
Southwest said in a filing that it continues to expect to report a loss for the first quarter, with lingering fallout from the December crisis cutting revenue by up to $350 million. That is on top of an $800 million drop in fourth-quarter pretax income that Southwest attributed to the meltdown, which is being investigated by federal officials.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.