American Airlines Briefly Grounds All Flights
American Airlines briefly grounded its flights nationwide Tuesday due to a technical problem. American said the problem was caused by a vendor technology issue that impacted systems needed to release flights.
December 24th and 25th usually see about 20% fewer travelers, compared to other days in the holiday season. But the ground stop still resulted in many delays and some cancellations.
American flights were grounded for about an hour on Tuesday morning. Flight tracking website FlightAware reported that 1,447 international and domestic flights were delayed and 28 flights canceled.
Dallas-Fort Worth and Charlotte saw the greatest number of delays.
The issue has now been resolved and flight have resumed. “We have resolved a vendor technology issue that briefly affected flights this morning,” the airline wrote at 10:32AM on X. “We sincerely apologize to our customers for the inconvenience and have issued a travel alert to allow for additional flexibility.”
Thankfully, this was nothing like Southwest’s mess two years ago, when more than 2 million travelers got stranded at airports during the holiday season.
