American Airlines cancelled an hour-long shutdown of all its flights in the United States due to an unspecified technical issue, briefly disrupting Christmas travel, according to Reuters.
A technical issue is affecting American flights this morning. Our teams are working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible, and we apologize to our customers for the inconvenience.
This was the latest technical issue to hit the industry after carriers suffered a global tech glitch earlier this year involving Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and software at cybersecurity company CrowdStrike. The disruptions cost Delta Air Lines at least $500 million.
Two years ago, Southwest Airlines suffered a systems failure during the holidays that led to the cancellation of 16,900 flights, stranding 2 million passengers. The company was eventually fined $140 million in the largest civil penalty in history for travel disruption.
American Airlines operates thousands of flights a day to more than 350 destinations in over 60 countries.
