The FAA issued a nationwide ground stop for American Airlines and its regional carriers at approximately 6:30 PM Eastern on Tuesday July 28 after a technology issue disrupted the airline's operational systems, halting all departures across the United States during one of the busiest travel evenings of the summer.
The ground stop was lifted at 7:18 PM ET and flights resumed shortly after.
"A technology issue briefly impacted connectivity for some of our systems on Tuesday evening," American Airlines said in a statement. "Systems are coming back online now and flights are departing again. We put a temporary ground stop in place while our teams worked to resolve the issue. We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience."
The cause was not disclosed. The outage came at a particularly bad time, the Northeast was simultaneously experiencing significant weather delays and ground stops from thunderstorms moving through the region, meaning passengers at New York, Newark, Washington D.C. and Baltimore airports were dealing with both weather and the AA outage simultaneously.
No flights were canceled as a direct result of the IT issue, though the compounding delays will ripple into Wednesday morning for some travelers.
This is not American's first IT disruption. The carrier experienced a similar ground stop on Christmas Eve 2024. The airline has not indicated whether Tuesday's outage involved the same systems or a different vendor.