Today, Dec. 24, American Airlines announced then lifted an hour-long ground stop of all its flights in the U.S. due to a technical issue, briefly disrupting holiday travel for thousands of passengers.
It is the latest technical snag to hit the industry after carriers were hit by a global tech outage tied to Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and a software issue at cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike earlier this year. The outage cost Delta Airlines at least $500 million.
Two years ago, Southwest Airlines experienced a meltdown with its systems during the holidays that led to 16,900 flight cancellations and stranded 2 million passengers. It was eventually fined $140 million in the largest-ever civil penalty for a travel disruption.
“A technical issue is affecting American flights this morning. Our teams are working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible, and we apologize to our customers for the inconvenience,” American Airlines had said in a statement following the ground stop.
American was responding to comments on X as numerous users posted there, as well as on Bluesky and Facebook.
According to X, passengers were being told that a software outage was preventing weight and balance calculations companywide.
One passenger tweeted: “Captain says @AmericanAir software outage preventing weight & balances ‘companywide’—with no estimate on resolution.”
Another user wrote: “Hey, @AmericanAir just tell us whether we should go home or not. Please don’t make us wait in the airport for hours.”
The outage came on a day when the airline is scheduled to have more than 3,300 domestic flights, according to the aviation analytics. The airline resumed service with residual delays but without a substantial number of cancelations.
Just 26 flights across all airlines were canceled nationwide, according to data tracker FlightAware. More than a thousand flights into, within and out of the United States were delayed—a number that picked up shortly after the American outage, but it could also be caused by airport congestion and some winter weather in the Northeast. Passengers are encouraged to check with their individual flights.
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