Southwest, Delta, and United Airlines Report Systemwide Outages

Several U.S. airlines were briefly hit by systemwide computer outages resulting in flight delays on Monday morning.

The outages, which were related to problems with the AeroData planning weight and balance program, affected several airlines, including Southwest Airlines, Delta Airlines, American Airlines, United Airlines and Alaska Air Group.

Monday morning, after reporting problems, Southwest said that technical issues had already been resolved and that systems would be back up soon, according to CNBC. The airline said earlier that flights were delayed and planes that were taxiing had to return to their gates.

Delta Airlines also confirmed that data had become available and that flights were operating normally.

“A brief third-party technology issue that prevented some Delta Connection flights from being dispatched on time this morning has been resolved,” Delta spokeswoman Savannah Huddleston said in a statement, according to USA Today. “No cancellations are expected due to the issue and our teams are working to resolve some resulting delays.”

Carriers reported the initial issues via social media, with United Airlines announcing that it was unable to create paperwork as well.

American Airlines said the outage was affecting regional carriers around the country, but since announced that the AeroData problems were resolved.

“Earlier this morning; AeroData had a technical issue that impacted a few of our regional carries,” American spokesman Ross Feinstein said in a statement. “This technical issue has been resolved. We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience.”

Alaska Air Group Inc also said that it was experiencing a system-wide outage.

In a statement, Southwest said that it “lifted an internal ground stop implemented for about 40 minutes this morning during an outage with a vendor that services multiple carriers with data used in flight planning. Scattered flight delays are anticipated and Customers should check Southwest.com for the latest updates on specific flights.”

The issues came about a week after several airlines reported problems after Sabre, a company that airlines use for printing tickets and making reservations, had technical issues of its own. Sabre said it was not responsible for software issues on Monday.