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403 Forbidden Error on Wifi

thadsmith
Explorer C

Hoping a SWA technical support person or engineer can weigh in on this. We use Okta for our single sign-on solution and I noticed on the last few flights that I can no longer access any okta.com website which means I can't login to applications (killing my productivity) while I'm in the air. One of my customers noticed the exact same thing and asked if we can help solve the issue as it's affecting their executives who travel exclusively on Southwest. The error we are receiving is "HTTP 403 Forbidden". 

 

I have also had a major issue with email the last few weeks. Some emails go through fine but others time out resulting in Outlook sending the email multiple times. I spammed a customer with the same 20 emails on my flight home from Las Vegas to Austin last Thursday. I looked through my sent emails and noticed this on several flights the last few weeks.

12 REPLIES 12

Re: 403 Forbidden Error on Wifi

bec102896
Aviator A

Sorry to hear you have been experiencing issues with the WiFi recently. I would recommend reaching out to southwest on Facebook or Twitter so they can’t pass on the errors to the appropriate team. 

 

@MarkHursh do you know anything about this by chance? 

Re: 403 Forbidden Error on Wifi

MarkHursh
Employee
Employee

So sorry for the trouble.  If you have a chance, could you private message me with the dates of your affected flights and the e-mail address you used for purchasing WiFi?  We'll use that information to work with our provider to research the issue.

 

Thanks,

Mark

Re: 403 Forbidden Error on Wifi

chiaseth
Explorer C

Hi @MarkHursh,

 

I am currently on a flight and experiencing this very problem, and had this problem on another SWA flight last week as well, which were the last 2 times I paid for SWA wifi. I can send you the flight numbers and dates though I suspect the problem isn't isolated to any one flight.

 

My company uses Okta for authentication to all of our sites, and I get a "403 Forbidden" message in all browsers (tried Chrome, Firefox, Safari) whenever I try to login to any of our company sites in which there is normally an Okta redirection to login. I also get that 403 message when I directly browser to <my_company>.okta.com.

 

I also tried logging into our corporate VPN to see if it'd make a difference, and that results in no connectivity whatsoever, DNS doesn't even seem to work. Unrelated problem I'm guessing but it was a workaround I was hoping would work.

 

I appreciate you looking further into this, because if I can't reach my company's sites, it makes onboard wifi mostly useless to me, since that's what I use it for almost exclusively.

 

Thanks,

Seth

 

 

Re: 403 Forbidden Error on Wifi

jsmeyer777
Explorer C

I have experienced exactly the same issue -- 403 Forbidden error.  My company uses Okta as a single sign-on portal as well and there is no reason why I can think of that Okta should be blocked.  It isn't even remotely high-bandwidth and no different from any other TLS site.

Re: 403 Forbidden Error on Wifi

MarkHursh
Employee
Employee

Hi All,

 

So sorry for the trouble.  Do you mind PMing me a few details where you experienced this issue?

 

- Date and Time

- Flight Number

- Email address you used to pay for the service or the RR # if you signed in with your A List Preferred account

- Device MAC Address (if you know this)

- Screenshot of any error you received (If you have this)


Thanks so much!

Re: 403 Forbidden Error on Wifi

dbriggs
Explorer C

Hi Mark

 

Do you know how much longer this blocking of okta.com subdomains on southwest wifi will continue?

 

I find it irritating that I had to turn on a personal vpn to sidestep this block so that I could log into my company vpn which requires logging into okta.

 

Thanks!

Re: 403 Forbidden Error on Wifi

MarkHursh
Employee
Employee

Hi All,

 

My apologies for the delay on this thread.  We have escalated this internally and will be meeting with our service provider on the issue. 

 

Sorry for the challenges here.  We've been getting conflicting information as to whether this was working or not after working with partners on this issue.  This information has been quite helpful to ensure we can continue to triage this one.

 

In the interim, if you experience the issue please PM me with the following:

 

* Flight Date, Origin, Destination, and Flight Number

* Your MAC address on your device used

* The WiFi purchaser e-mail address or your RR number if you signed in with A-List Preferred benefits

 

Thanks so much for your support and for your feedback.


I'll plan to share a status update as to our resolution progress by end of day Friday, May 29, 2020.

 

-Mark

 

Re: 403 Forbidden Error on Wifi

MarkHursh
Employee
Employee
Solution

HI All,

 

Update on this one.  We have notified our service provider who is working with OKTA to try to triage and rectify the issue.   We have had prior issues here which we thought were fully resolved, but alas, they were not!

 

In the interim, if you experience the issue please PM me with the following:

 

* Flight Date, Origin, Destination, and Flight Number

* Your MAC address on your device used

* The WiFi purchaser e-mail address or your RR number if you signed in with A-List Preferred benefits

* Your OKTA URL including the business name  It will be something like https://[company_name].okta.com– the [company_name] part is of particular interest.

 

Thanks so much for your support and for your feedback.

 

-Mark

Re: 403 Forbidden Error on Wifi

MarkHursh
Employee
Employee

Hi There.  We've had no further reports of issues with OKTA.  Please do let us know if you experience any other issues and we will investigate.