American Airlines flights across the country were temporarily grounded Tuesday afternoon due to a technology incident that caused chaos for the airline and its travelers.
The Federal Aviation Administration announced that the issue forced American to put a “temporary ground stop” in place, which prevents planes from departing during until the issue is resolved.
Typically, when a ground stop is put in place, flights that are already en route to their destination can proceed as normal with little restriction, although they could face potential airborne holding or, at worst, a diversion to a new airport.
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It’s unclear if any flights that were active at the time of the ground stop were affected.
According to FlightRadar24, at the time of the outage, there were 130 fewer flights in the air than the same time the previous week.
By around 4:20 p.m. PDT, American announced that its systems were “coming back online” and flights were given the clear to depart again.
“We put a temporary ground stop in place while our teams worked to resolve the issue. We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience,” American Airlines said in a post to social media.
Why were American Airlines flights grounded?
The specific details of the “technology issues” were not immediately disclosed by the airline or federal officials.
Hundreds of people utilized the online reporting tool Downdetector to report issues with the American Airlines app and website. Reddit users who identified themselves as employees of American claimed that systems they would typically use for work services were also affected by the outage.
Rabble News reached out to the American Airlines media team for comment and received the following statement:
A technology issue briefly impacted connectivity for some of our systems on Tuesday evening. Connectivity has been fully restored. We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience. We appreciate the efforts of our team to bring our systems back online so quickly and take care of our customers.”
American Airlines spokesperson
Officials have not released any word about the severity of the technological issue or if any foul play might be suspected.
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