This article is from the source 'guardian' and was first published or seen on . The next check for changes will be

You can find the current article at its original source at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/06/united-grounds-flights-technology-issue

The article has changed 2 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.

Version 0 Version 1
United Airlines grounds hundreds of US flights due to widespread tech issue United Airlines says issue that forced grounding of hundreds of US flights resolved
(about 2 hours later)
Ground stops issued nationwide including at hubs in Chicago, Denver, Houston, Newark and San Francisco Ground stops were issued nationwide including at hubs in Chicago, Denver, Houston, Newark and San Francisco
United Airlines on Wednesday said it had suspended flights due to a widespread tech issue, and anticipates additional flight delays in the evening. United Airlines has said a technology issue that led to the grounding of flights for a few hours and major delays across its network in the US has been resolved.
“Due to a technology issue, we are holding United mainline flights at their departure airports,” United said in a statement. “We expect additional flight delays this evening as we work through this issue. Safety is our top priority, and we’ll work with our customers to get them to their destinations.” “While we expect residual delays, our team is working to restore our normal operations,” the airline said in a statement late on Wednesday.
According to the Federal Aviation Administration’s website, ground stops had been issued for United Airlines flights at several US airports including its hubs in Chicago, Denver, Houston, Newark and San Francisco. The issue prompted ground stops at several major United hub airports including Newark, Denver, Houston and Chicago, according to the US Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) website.
The ground stop does not affect United Express flights, and any flight already in the air will continue to its destination, the airline said. United said the problem related to its Unimatic system that housed information about each flight that was then fed to other systems, including those that calculated weight and balance and tracked flight times.
As of Wednesday evening, tracking site FlightAware reported that United had delayed 28%, or 876, of that day’s flights. The US transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, said on X that the issue was specific to United’s operations and was unrelated to the broader air traffic control system.
As frustrated passengers took to social media, United apologized for the disruption and assured people their teams were “working to resolve the widespread system error as quickly as possible”. United said it was treating the technology issue as a controllable delay, meaning it would pay customer expenses such as hotels where applicable.
As of Wednesday evening, tracking site FlightAware showed that 1,038, or 34%, of United flights had been delayed on Wednesday.
The day’s issues come just a few weeks after Alaska Airlines grounded all of its flights for about three hours due to an IT outage for the second time in just over a year.
In April 2024, Alaska grounded its entire fleet due to an issue with the system that calculates the weight and balance of its planes.