FAA Grounds American Airlines Flights Due to IT Outage

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) temporarily grounded all flights from American Airlines due to a systemwide IT failure that affected airports nationwide. The outage lasted less than an hour and did not impact flights that had already departed. American Airlines stated, "A technology issue briefly impacted connectivity for some of our systems on Tuesday evening. Connectivity has been fully restored. We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience. We appreciate the efforts of our team to bring our systems back online so quickly and take care of our customers." Although the ground stop was brief, it is expected to have lingering effects on flight schedules. The delays were compounded by existing weather-related disruptions across the country. American Airlines has experienced similar IT issues in the past, including disruptions in 2013 and a nationwide ground stop in 2018, both of which were resolved in under an hour.