American Airlines Halted Nationwide By IT Outage — Flights Missed Their Chance To Take Off Between Northeast Storms

American Airlines has halted departures across the country after a systemwide IT outage took down its systems. I’m sitting on an American Airlines flight as I write this. Our captain told us that no American flight could take off, that the airline was trying to “reboot the system in Dallas,” and that this should take “10 minutes” but we’re taking an initial 30-minute delay on an already-delayed flight. In fact, the systems are coming back up! But it’s caused flights to miss their takeoff opportunity in-between severe weather events in the Northeast At 6:29 p.m. Eastern, the FAA issued an advisory imposing a ground stop beginning at 6:30 p.m. for American and its subsidiaries. The order covers every U.S. departure facility, every destination and all aircraft. The FAA gives the reason simply as an “IT outage.” The initial ground-stop window runs through 7:30 p.m. Eastern, with an update expected then. That’s a planning window, not an estimate that the outage will necessarily last an hour. It could be lifted early or extended. Flights already in the air continue flying. Passenger reports began appearing about 20 minutes before the formal FAA ground stop. Reports have come from DFW, Charlotte, Chicago O’Hare, Orlando, New Orleans, LaGuardia, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Seattle and numerous smaller stations. Boarding passes won’t load in the app Airport agents unable to check in, board or rebook passengers Checked baggage and gate systems unavailable Aircraft unable to obtain flight plans or push back Maintenance unable to submit an electronic aircraft signoff My first thought was American’s passenger service platform which handles reservations, check-in, boarding and baggage. But I’m not sure that would explain maintenance signoffs and flight plans. And there’s no reported issue with other airlines on Sabre systems reporting similar issues. In December 2024, an outage involving network hardware took down the systems needed to release flights. American stopped departures nationwide for about an hour. That incident involved flight planning, dispatch and weight-and-balance. Last June an outage disrupted booking, check-in, ticketing, baggage tagging and maintenance. Thunderstorms were already producing major ground stops and delays today. My own earlier flight was cancelled. And this delay pushed us into another weather event and ground stop – we missed our window and we’re being deplaned. Getting off the plane my thought was that hopefully the American Airlines IT team in Hyderabad can successfully turn everything off and then on and the weather event won’t last long. But then American’s systems starting to come back on so we wait and hope for a new takeoff time once systems fully recover. The system outage caused weather delays to turn into controllable delays – passengers who would have made their connections missing them because they couldn’t take off when weather was good. However, since the outage was less than 90 minutes a passenger delayed three hours or more because of that additional delay will still likely be told no to a meal voucher. Topics on this page