American Airlines temporarily halts flights across the country due to technical issues

As the Christmas travel season kicks into high gear, American Airlines temporarily suspended flights across the country on Tuesday due to technical issues.

Federal regulators cleared the U.S. flights about an hour after they issued a nationwide ground stop order.

Just before 7 a.m. ET, the Federal Aviation Administration grounded all flights within the United States at the request of American Airlines. American Airlines reported a technical issue affecting its entire system as millions of people traveled for vacation.

The ground stop lasted a full hour, according to the time stamp on the FAA order.

American did not elaborate on what technical issue caused the flight to be grounded, and the airline did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The suspension could not come at a worse time for the millions of travelers expected to fly in the next 10 days. The Transportation Security Administration expects to screen 40 million passengers during the holidays and through January 2.

Many flights during the holidays are sold out, making flight cancellations even more devastating than during the off-season. Even if it’s just a brief disruption, cancellations can have a knock-on effect that can take days to unwind.

Southwest Airlines stranded 2 million passengers in December 2022, and Delta Air Lines suffered a smaller but serious global technical outage in July due to a faulty software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. collapse.

Southwest Airlines has been ordered to pay a $35 million fine as part of a $140 million settlement to resolve the federal investigation into the 2022 Christmas disaster.

Excluding the settlement, the fourth-largest U.S. airline by revenue said the crisis had cost it more than $1.1 billion in refunds and reimbursements, additional costs and lost ticket sales over several months.