Analysis: Southwest network failure raises concerns over system's strength

A technology failure that temporarily halted all departures of Southwest flights Tuesday is raising fresh concerns about the resiliency of the US carrier's IT infrastructure, industry experts and the carrier's pilots' union said on Wednesday. The Dallas-based carrier has blamed the hour-long outage on a vendor-supplied network firewall failure, causing a temporary loss of connection to key systems. Southwest told Reuters on Wednesday it opted to halt flights out of caution, adding there were no indications of a cyber attack. It declined to identify the vendor and did not address why this failure was not part of the company's planning. While the exact cause is not clear, some industry experts questioned why Southwest systems did not include more redundancy. The carrier has been under fire since a software problem over the Christmas holiday led to over 16,700 flight cancellations, disrupted travel plans for 2m customers and cost it more than $1b. "This would indicate that resiliency is not adequately addressed in their systems," said Eric Parent, a private pilot and CEO of EVA Technologies, a cybersecurity firm with offices in Canada, the US and Europe. "Some significant improvements should be considered to increase their maturity and capacity to maintain operations." Jose Fernandez, a pilot and retired professor specializing in aviation and cybersecurity at Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, added: "If one firewall equipment failure led to this, it's not very resilient."<br/>