Technical issue briefly grounds American Airlines flights across US

A technical snafu briefly grounded American Airlines flights across the US on Christmas Eve.

American Airlines tells The Register that the technology issue impacted systems necessary for flight releases. In response, the FAA reports that the airline requested a nationwide stop order, which began around 1150 UTC and lasted about an hour.

In a statement, the US’ largest airline blamed a “vendor technology” issue for the disruption, but didn’t name and shame any specific provider.

“That issue has been resolved and flights have resumed. We sincerely apologize to our customers for the inconvenience this morning. It’s all hands on deck as our team is working diligently to get customers where they need to go as quickly as possible,” an American Airlines spokesperson told The Register in an email.

American Airlines didn’t address El Reg’s questions as to whether resolving the issue could result in additional delays or disruptions over the holiday season.

The airline is encouraging customers to use their mobile app or visit their website for information on how the outage may have affected their flights and connections.

The incident comes amid one of the busiest travel seasons of the year, with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) expecting to screen nearly 40 million passengers over the peak Christmas and New Year’s travel period.

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As technology relayed travel disruptions go, an hour-long grounding is far from the worst. Over the past few years, we’ve seen numerous situations in which IT failures have left millions stranded. Two years ago, an IT meltdown at Southwest Airlines left roughly 2 million travelers stranded as crews were forced to schedule flights manually in what was later described as an “extraordinarily difficult” and “tedious, long process.”

More recently, the now infamous Crowdstrike outage brought much of the IT world to a standstill. It is estimated the flawed update to the Falcon thread-detection system crashed and disabled more than 8 million Microsoft Windows machines around the world. Among them were more than 37,000 systems operated by Delta Airlines. The incident resulted in travel delays for more than 1.3 million people, the airline later revealed. ®