After an unexplained technical problem, American Airlines lifts the ground stop

A notice on the website of the US aviation regulator said that American Airlines lifted an hour-long groundstop for all its flights in the US on Tuesday, December 24. The reason for the stop was an unknown technical problem.

Many people’s holiday plans were in danger because of the ground stop before the busy Christmas travel season.

“American flights are having trouble this morning because of a technical problem. “Our teams are working to fix the problem as soon as possible, and we’re sorry for the trouble this has caused our customers,” the company said in a statement after the ground stop.

Every day, Americans make thousands of trips to more than 350 cities in more than 60 countries.

Company shares made up some of the ground they lost and were only slightly down before the bell.

In a statement, the US Federal Aviation Administration told Reuters to contact the airline and said again that the company had reported a technical problem.

American was responding to comments on X as numerous users posted there, as well as on Bluesky and Facebook.

“Hey, @AmericanAir just tell us whether we should go home or not. Please don’t make us wait in the airport for hours,” wrote one user.

The grounding comes months after airlines were hit by a global tech outage tied to Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and a software issue at cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.

Two years ago, Southwest Airlines experienced a meltdown with its systems during the holidays that led to 16,900 flight cancellations and stranded 2 million passengers. It was eventually fined US$140 million in the largest-ever civil penalty for a travel disruption.