American Airlines briefly grounded after IT outage

The US aviation authority FAA had imposed a nationwide ground stop on American Airlines on Tuesday evening due to an IT outage.

The cause of the disruption remains unknown. According to American Airlines, a technical fault impacted the connectivity of several internal systems starting around 6 p.m. Eastern Time, including software for flight planning, dispatch, boarding, and check-in. The airline subsequently requested a nationwide ground stop from the FAA for itself and its regional partner carriers, meaning aircraft already at the gate were initially unable to depart. Flights already in the air were not affected by the disruption. American Airlines stated:

“A technology issue briefly impacted connectivity for some of our systems on Tuesday evening. Systems are coming back online now and flights are departing 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

The FAA lifted the roughly 45-minute ground stop around 7:20 p.m. Eastern Time. According to the airline, it is not yet known what caused the disruption. There are no indications so far of a possible cyberattack. Due to the aftereffects of the nationwide stop, delays continued at US airports beyond that evening.

American Airlines: A reminder of the 2024 CrowdStrike outage

The last comparable incident at a major US airline occurred in July 2024, when a faulty update from security vendor CrowdStrike crashed around 8.5 million Windows systems worldwide and disrupted Delta Air Lines’ IT systems for nearly a week. That outage affected more than 1.3 million passengers in the US, led to the cancellation of around 7,000 flights, and cost Delta an estimated 500 million US dollars, according to the company.

(red)