United Airlines grounds flights at US airports over tech glitch
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United suffered an outage of its weight calculation system, a source familiar with the matter said.
PHOTO: HIROKO MASUIKE/NYTIMES
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WASHINGTON – United Airlines said it had grounded its flights at US airports on Aug 6 due to a technology issue and warned of additional flight delays in the evening.
“Due to a technology issue, we are holding United mainline flights at their departure airports,” the airline said.
United suffered an outage of its weight calculation system, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters.
“The issue affecting United Airlines flights has been resolved and mainline flights are departing once again,” flight tracking website FlightRadar24 said on social media at 9.19pm Eastern Time (9.19am Singapore time, Aug 7).
The US Federal Aviation Administration said earlier that it had issued a ground stop for United flights at several US airports.
The ground stops were issued at major United hub airports including Newark, Denver, Houston and Chicago, according to the regulator’s website.
As at 9.25pm Eastern Time, flight tracking data from FlightAware showed that 870, or 28 per cent, of United flights had been delayed on Aug 6.
United’s outage came a few weeks after Alaska Airlines grounded all of its flights for about three hours due to an information technology 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. REUTERS
