Southwest Airlines ground stop affecting flights at Birmingham-Shuttlesworth

Southwest Airlines ground stop affecting flights at Birmingham-Shuttlesworth

Heading out of Birmingham-Shuttlesworth today on Southwest Airlines?

You might need to check on your flight.

Southwest Airlines today was briefly affected nationwide by a ground stop due to technology issues.

CNBC reported that, as of shortly about 11 a.m. ET, more than 1,500 flights, or 36% of Southwest’s schedule, were delayed, attributing the data to flight-tracking site FlightAware.

Kim Hunt, spokesperson for the Birmingham Airport Authority, said that anyone scheduled for a Southwest flight today should keep an eye on the status of their departure times.

“All of our morning flights during the outage have departed,” Hunt said. “We are showing some delays on Southwest flights throughout the rest of the day. Some are slight….others up to an hour or two.”

Southwest said in a statement that its teams “worked quickly to minimize flight disruptions.”

“Early this morning, a vendor-supplied firewall went down and connection to some operational data was unexpectedly lost,” Southwest said.