American Airlines flights resume after nationwide delay due to “technical issue,” ground stop now lifted

American Airlines flights across the United States were delayed by technical issues on Tuesday morning, interrupting travel on one of the busiest days of the year.

The airline requested a nationwide ground stop, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA later lifted the ground stop following the relatively brief outage. American Airlines said flights had resumed by 8:50 a.m. EDT.

No American Airlines flights were canceled as a result of the stoppage.

“A vendor technology issue briefly affected flights this morning. That issue has been resolved and flights have resumed,” the airline said in a statement. “We sincerely apologize to our customers for the inconvenience this morning. It’s all hands on deck as our team is working diligently to get customers where they need to go as quickly as possible.”

The setback affected the systems needed for American to release flights, the airline said. 

The FAA ordered a ground stop for all American Airlines flights in the U.S., including those operated by the airline’s subsidiaries, at around 6:50 a.m. on Tuesday. That order was canceled about an hour later, the Air Traffic Control Command Center said in an advisory.

At the time, American reported “a technical issue” affecting its flights Tuesday morning.

“Our teams are working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible, and we apologize to our customers for the inconvenience,” said the airline in an earlier statement obtained by CBS News.

A few minutes prior to the ground stop, American Airlines acknowledged that technical problems were hindering flight plans in a social media post. Replying to a user on X who said at around 6:30 a.m. that their flight from St. Louis to Miami was stalled, mentioning a “system wide outage,” the airline said: “We’re currently experiencing a technical issue with all American Airlines flights. Your safety is our utmost priority, once this is rectified, we’ll have you safely on your way to your destination.”

When asked by the traveler to provide an estimated timeframe, American said the airline could not but reiterated that its team was “trying to fix it in the shortest possible time.”

The outage came in the middle of a particularly hectic holiday travel season, which could shape up to be American Airlines’ busiest on record, the company’s vice president said last week. Since last Wednesday, almost 3.3 million people have traveled on American flights, and another 700,000 were expected to do the same on Sunday, according to the airline. 

That’s in line with national travel projections for the end of the year. AAA said more than 119 million people were expected to travel at least 50 miles from their homes between Saturday of last weekend and New Year’s Day, which falls on Wednesday of next week. If those numbers prove true, they would top the previous year-end travel record in 2019, according to the auto club.

Projections for air travel specifically were also quite high. After the U.S. House narrowly avoided a government shutdown last Friday, the Transportation Security Administration said it was preparing to screen almost 40 million people at U.S. airports between Dec. 19 and Jan. 2. Airlines for America, a trade group, offered a similar figure, saying in a separate statement that it anticipated U.S. airlines would carry 54 million passengers between Dec. 18 and Jan. 6. Both estimates from TSA and Airlines for America represented at least a 6% jump from holiday air travel statistics last year.

American Airlines said it had been “doing quite well” prior to Christmas Eve as staff worked to keep up with holiday demands, noting in another statement that the airline “has had more on-time departures than any of our major airline competitors since the holiday travel period began on Dec. 18.” Tuesday was one of the lighter days for American as part of the holiday stretch.

None of its mainline flights — which excludes those operated by its subsidiaries — were canceled on Sunday, Dec. 22, one of the busier days of the season, according to American. The airline also said it only canceled 136 of 31,000 flights scheduled from last Wednesday through Sunday, with almost all of the cancellations attributed to a bout of winter weather that reduced visibility.