by Donald Wood
Last updated: 8:10 AM ET, Wed July 29, 2026
A systemwide IT outage for American Airlines on Tuesday forced
the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to issue a nationwide ground stop for
the carrier, but the order was lifted a few hours later.
According to ABC News, a spokesperson for American Airlines announced
that the issues plaguing its IT systems had been “fully restored” and that the
full flight schedule would be back to normal as soon as possible.
While the airline didn’t reveal the cause of the computer
issues, it worked quickly on Tuesday to remedy them and apologized to customers
for the inconvenience.
“A technology issue briefly impacted connectivity for some
of our systems on Tuesday evening,” an American spokesperson told Fox
News. “Connectivity has been fully restored. We apologize to our customers
for the inconvenience. We appreciate the efforts of our team to bring our
systems back online so quickly and take care of our customers.”
While the nationwide ground stop has been lifted, Charlotte
Douglas International Airport (CLT) in North Carolina is still dealing with
delays and cancellations as American accrued a significant backlog of flights
due to the IT issues.
Travelers scheduled to fly to or from Charlotte were experiencing
“average delays climbing from 24 minutes to 49 minutes,” with a “30% to 60%
chance the localized ground stop in Charlotte will be extended beyond its
scheduled end time.”
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