American Airlines flights across the United States were delayed by technical issues Tuesday morning, disrupting travel on one of the busiest days of the year.
The airline requested a domestic ground stop, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA later lifted the ground stop after the relatively brief outage. American Airlines said flights had resumed by 8:50 a.m. EDT.
“A supplier technology issue briefly affected flights this morning. This issue has been resolved and flights have resumed,” the airline said in a statement. “We sincerely apologize to our customers for the inconvenience this morning. Everything is in hand as our team is working diligently to get customers where they need to go as quickly as possible.”
The mishap affected systems needed for American to release flights, the airline said.
The FAA ordered a ground stop for all American Airlines flights in the US, including those operated by the airline’s subsidiaries, around 6:50 a.m. Tuesday. That order was canceled about an hour later, the Air Traffic Control Command Center said in an advisory.
American then reported “a technical issue” affecting its flights Tuesday morning.
“Our teams are working to resolve the issue as soon as possible and we apologize to our customers for the inconvenience,” the airline said in an earlier statement obtained by CBS News.
Minutes before the ground stop, American Airlines acknowledged that technical issues were hampering flight plans in a social media post. Responding to a user on X who said around 6:30 a.m. that his flight from St. Louis to Miami was grounded, citing a “system-wide outage,” the airline said: “We are currently experiencing a technical issue with all American Airlines flights. Your safety is our highest priority, as this being rectified, we shall have you safely on your way to your destination.”
When asked by the traveler to provide an estimated time frame, American said the airline could only reiterate that its team was “trying to fix this as quickly as possible.”
The disruption came amid a particularly busy holiday travel season, which could become the busiest in American Airlines’ history. said the company’s vice president last week Since last Wednesday, nearly 3.3 million people have traveled on American flights, and another 700,000 were expected to do the same on Sunday, according to the airline.
This is in line with domestic travel projections for the end of the year. AAA said more than 119 million people were expected to travel at least 50 miles from home between Saturday last weekend and New Year’s Day, which falls on Wednesday next week. If these figures prove true, they would surpass the previous year-end travel record set in 2019, according to the auto club.
Projections for specific air travel were also quite high. After the U.S. House narrowly averted a government shutdown last Friday, the Transportation Security Administration said it was preparing to screen nearly 40 million people at U.S. airports between Dec. 19 and January 2 Airlines for America, a trade group, offered a similar figure. , saying in a separate statement that it expected US airlines to carry 54 million passengers between Dec. 18 and Jan. 6. Both TSA and Airlines for America estimates represented at least a 6% jump in holiday air travel statistics last year.
American Airlines said it had been “pretty good” before Christmas Eve as staff worked to keep up with holiday demands, noting in another statement that the airline “has had more more punctual departures than any of our major airline competitors since the holidays. The travel period began on December 18.”
None of its mainline flights, which exclude those operated by its subsidiaries, were canceled on Sunday, Dec. 22, one of the busiest days of the season, according to American. The airline also said it canceled just 136 of its 31,000 scheduled flights between last Wednesday and Sunday, with almost all of the cancellations attributed to a hit of winter weather which reduced visibility.