American Airlines and its regional carriers briefly halted all departures nationwide on July 28 after an IT systems outage disrupted operations across the US [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. The Federal Aviation Administration issued a ground stop for all American flights around 6:30pm Eastern Time, which remained in place until about 7:18pm, when the airline's systems were restored and flights resumed [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].
Flight tracking data showed approximately 1,100 American Airlines flights were delayed that day, representing roughly 30% of the airline's scheduled departures. Additionally, 221 flights, around 6%, were cancelled due to the outage [1, 3, 5]. The disruption also affected the airline's regional carriers, compounding delays in the network [1, 3, 5].
The outage occurred amid storm-related delays at several East Coast airports already contending with significant disruptions. FlightRadar24 reported that at 7pm ET, there were 130 fewer flights in the air compared to the same time the previous week [1, 2, 5].
American Airlines said its teams worked to resolve the issue during the ground stop. The airline apologized to customers, stating, "We put a temporary ground stop in place while our teams worked to resolve the issue. We apologise to our customers for the inconvenience" [1]. In a separate statement, the carrier added, "A technology issue briefly impacted connectivity for some of our systems on Tuesday evening. Systems are coming back online now and flights are departing again" [4]. The airline did not disclose what caused the outage [4].
Flights resumed nationwide shortly after 7:18pm ET once the IT systems were restored, allowing delayed planes to depart and operations to normalize for the remainder of the day [1, 3, 4, 5].
