World’s biggest carrier hobbled on one of the busiest travel days of the year

American Airlines, the world’s largest carrier, on Tuesday lifted an hour-long grounding of all its flights in the United States after dealing with an unspecified technical issue, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said.

The so-called ground stop, coming on the morning of Christmas Eve, had threatened the holiday plans of hundreds of thousands of people on one of the busiest travel days of the year.

“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,” the company said in a statement following the ground stop.

American operates 6,800 flights per day to more than 350 destinations in more than 60 countries.

The FAA confirmed that the carrier had reported a technical issue. It did not elaborate.

American was responding to comments on X as numerous users posted there, as well as on Bluesky and Facebook.

“Hey, @AmericanAir just tell us whether we should go home or not. Please don’t make us wait in the airport for hours,” wrote one user.

The grounding comes months after airlines were hit by a global tech outage tied to Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and a software issue at the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.

Two years ago, Southwest Airlines in the US experienced a meltdown with its systems during the holidays that led to 16,900 flight cancellations and stranded 2 million passengers. It was eventually fined $140 million in the largest-ever civil penalty for a travel disruption.