x
Breaking News
More () »

American Airlines tech glitch suspends flights for 40 minutes Sunday

A spokesperson said there were no flight cancellations because of the issue.
Credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images
An American Airlines aricraft sits at a gate at O'Hare International Airport on May 11, 2018 in Chicago, Illinois.

American Airlines suffered another technical glitch Sunday that halted flights for about 40 minutes, but the airline said no flights were canceled as a result.

The airline’s main operating system and dispatch went down about 2:05 p.m. and the carrier temporarily suspended flights, the Federal Aviation Administration said. Flights resumed about 2:45 p.m., according to FAA.

Michelle Mohr, an American spokeswoman, said the problem stemmed from “a connectivity issue with one of our data centers.”

“All is back to normal and, thankfully, there were no cancellations as a result of the issue,” she said.

The latest outage came after the airline had a computer glitch at PSA Airlines, a wholly-owned subsidiary, that began June 14 and cancelled about 3,000 flights during the week. The incident cost the carrier an estimated $35 million in revenue.

But, Mohr said the two outages weren't related.

CEO Doug Parker expressed regret about the June outage during an earnings call Thursday.

“The computer outage at PSA in June was extremely disruptive to our team and our customers,” Parker said. “Our team members did heroic things to address that issue and take care of our customers, but we regret the inconvenience that we caused for so many.”

Maya Leibman, chief information officer, said the June outage was unusual for taking down both the airline’s primary and second servers.

“I would love to tell you that technology is bulletproof and that every issue is avoidable but, unfortunately, that is not the case,” Leibman said. “In this case, because of nature of issue and because of how unusual it was, it took down both our primary and redundant servers.”

American has “a comprehensive program around disaster recovery, around high availability and redundancy. That is our objective.”

“The problem is that technology is not always as bulletproof as we’d like it to be,” she said. “In the airline industry, issues are very immediately apparent to the entire public and they’re very negatively impactful.”

Before You Leave, Check This Out