American Airlines and its regional carriers briefly halted departures across the US on Tuesday after a systemwide IT outage disrupted operations, according to reports.
The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a ground stop for American Airlines flights at around 6:30 pm ET due to the outage. The restriction was lifted at 7:18 pm ET after the airline began restoring its systems.
"Systems are coming back online now and flights are departing again," American Airlines said in a statement. "We put a temporary ground stop in place while our teams worked to resolve the issue. We apologise to our customers for the inconvenience."
The disruption delayed hundreds of flights as aircraft were unable to depart until the issue was resolved. The outage also coincided with severe thunderstorms that triggered delays and ground stops at several airports across the US East Coast.
According to FlightAware, American Airlines delayed more than 1,100 flights, or about 30% of its scheduled operations on Tuesday, and cancelled 221 flights, representing roughly 6% of its schedule.
Flightradar24 said there were around 130 fewer American Airlines flights in the air at 7 p.m. ET compared with the same time a week earlier.
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