American Airlines Briefly Grounds Every Flight After Nationwide IT Outage

American Airlines briefly halted departures across its entire network on Tuesday evening after a technology failure affected its IT systems. The Federal Aviation Administration issued a ground stop at about 6:29 PM ET at the airline’s request, preventing aircraft from leaving gates until fixes were implemented. The stop was lifted at 7:18 PM ET, and American said the disruption lasted 45 minutes in total. Flights already in the air continued as planned, but the pause hit during the evening peak rush and amid severe thunderstorms affecting parts of the U.S. East Coast. American confirmed an outage on X but did not specify the system or whether it involved cybersecurity. FlightAware data showed 1,387 delays and 341 cancellations.