American Airlines flights resumed Tuesday evening after a widescale IT issue temporarily prevented hundreds of aircraft on the ground from taking off.
The FAA issued a ground stop for American flights around 6:30 p.m. Eastern Time and lifted it at 7:18 p.m. During that time, hundreds of flights across the U.S. were put on hold.
Airplanes already in the air continued on their routes as normal.
The technology glitch compounded operational disruptions stemming from powerful thunderstorms on the East Coast. New York-JFK, LaGuardia, Newark, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Boston Logan, Reagan National, Baltimore, Charlotte Douglas, and Washington Dulles all reported higher delay and cancellation rates than normal, likely caused by both the storms and the ground stop.
According to data from FlightAware, 1,427 American flights were delayed on Tuesday, and 343 were canceled. The numbers include delays and cancellations for all reasons for all of Tuesday, not just during the ground stop.
“Systems are coming back online now and flights are departing again,” American said in a statement Tuesday evening. “We put a temporary ground stop in place while our teams worked to resolve the issue. We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience.”
The airline did not go into detail about what caused the IT problem, or which systems were affected.
