American Airlines resumes flights after unknown technical glitch halted ops

Budget carrier American Airlines on Tuesday grounded all its flights for about an hour in the US due to an unknown technical glitch, hampering travel plans of thousands of passengers on Christmas Eve.

“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,” the company said in a statement to Reuters.

The Federal Aviation Administration lifted the grounding of flights after announcing that the issue was resolved.

The airline, however, has not announced how long it will take to fix the issue and has been telling passengers on X to deal with ticketing issues and transfers.

Numerous passengers were posting on social media that their flights had been stuck on the runway at various airports and were now being sent back to the gate.

American Airlines is one of the biggest budget carriers in the US and operates thousands of flights per day to more than 350 destinations in more than 60 countries.

The US Federal Aviation Administration in a statement referred Reuters to the airline, reiterating that the carrier had reported a technical issue.

The grounding comes months after airlines were hit by a global tech outage tied to Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and a software issue at cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.

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.

With inputs from Reuters