American Airlines flights were held at airports around the country as the company dealt with what it called a “systemwide IT outage” Tuesday.
An alert from the FAA’s Operational Information System indicated all flights that had not taken off at airports around the country would be held at those gates due to the outage, which impacted the company’s technological infrastructure.
As of 6:20 p.m. CT, the FAA updated the message to say the ground stop had been lifted at most U.S. airports, though flights were still being held in Charlotte.
“A technology issue briefly impacted connectivity for some of our systems on Tuesday evening. Systems are coming back online now and flights are departing again,” an American Airlines spokesperson said. “We put a temporary ground stop in place while our teams worked to resolve the issue. We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience.”
On social media, the company was busy replying to customers seeking information about the issue, telling those individuals they were dealing with a “systemwide IT outage.”
In addition to grounding flights, the airline said it was unable to provide service on its mobile apps for customers looking to book or change flights, and it was also unable to answer phone calls to its customer service lines.
It is unclear how long it will take for services to be fully restored.
We will update this story with details as they become available.
This story originally appeared on NBCChicago.com.
