After a brief outage that grounded all American Airlines flights on Christmas Eve, the airline has resumed service.
American Airlines said a “technical issue” had delayed all of its flights in the United States. But the company began boarding flights again at around 8 a.m. ET, airline spokesperson Sarah Jantz told CNN.
The Allied Pilots Association said American Airlines’ Flight Operations System briefly went down Tuesday morning, which led to the delays, CNN reports. Known as the FOS, the system handles the airline’s operations, including passenger boarding. American Airlines has backup flight planning tools to prevent an outage from shutting down the entire airline for extended periods of time, according to the union, which said pilots and crew are trained to understand how to navigate a system outage.
According to an advisory notice, the Federal Aviation Administration posted a nationwide ground stop order for all AA flights at the airline’s request. The air carrier has not disclosed what the technical issue was.
Christmas Eve is expected to be one of the busiest travel days this year. The FAA said about 30,000 flights were scheduled across all airlines, Bloomberg reported.
