American Airlines' Sunday System Outage Causes 40-Minute Ground Stop
Technical glitches have plagued American Airlines in recent months. From a regional carrier's technical issue costing AA $35 million after canceling nearly 3,000 flights, to the most recent issue on Sunday, when an outage at the airline's main operating system caused a national ground stop.
Around 2:05pm ET on Sunday, the main operating system and dispatch of American Airlines went down, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. During the period while the system was down, all domestic AA flights were grounded.
According to CNBC, American said that it "experienced a brief connectivity issue" with one of its data centers. At around 2:45pm ET — 40 minutes after the system reportedly went down — the data center was restored and AA operations returned to normal.
As a result of the 40-minute outage, American said that no flights were canceled and only resulted in nine delays across the airline's system.
According to USA Today, American Airlines wasn't alone in its system issues on Sunday. One of its regional partners, SkyWest Airlines, also faced a system outage, which delayed some of its flights — and therefore some Delta, United and Alaska flights.
TPG reached out to American for more information on the impact of the system outage on Sunday's travel but did not immediately hear back.
In June, PSA — and therefore American — faced another system outage, resulting in nearly 3,000 flight cancellations. However, that one and Sunday's incident are unrelated.
