NEED TO KNOW
- United Airlines halted domestic flights on Wednesday, Aug. 6
- The flights were grounded on account of a “technology issue”
- United Airlines tells PEOPLE they “are working with customers to get them to their destinations after a technology disruption”
United Airlines temporarily halted domestic flights in the U.S. due to a “technology issue,” according to the airline on Wednesday, Aug. 6.
“We are working with customers to get them to their destinations after a technology disruption on Wednesday evening,” a spokesperson for United tells PEOPLE. “The underlying technology issue has been resolved, and, while we expect residual delays, our team is working to restore our normal operations.”
The cause of the “disruption” was “not related to recent concerns about cybersecurity in the airline industry,” the rep adds.
The outage began at 6:12 p.m. ET and “was resolved within a few hours,” United’s spokesperson says, “although residual delays continued into Wednesday night.”
As of 9:45 p.m. ET, around 31% of the carrier’s flights had been delayed, and 1% had been canceled a according to flight data tracker FlightAware, per CNN.
Airports in Chicago, Denver, Newark, N.J., Houston and San Francisco have been impacted, per the Federal Aviation Administration system status.
“We’re missing some numbers we need to take off so we can’t take off yet and don’t have a time estimate of when we’ll be able to,” passenger Angela Jeffers, whose flight from Nashville to Denver was delayed two hours on Wednesday, told CNN.
United’s spokesperson tells PEOPLE that the airline is “treating this as a controllable delay, meaning we paid customer expenses such as hotels when applicable.”
United’s grounded flights come after Alaska Airlines grounded all of its flights for about three hours due to an IT outage on July 21. Another outage took place in April 2024.
PEOPLE has reached out to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for more information.
This is a breaking story that will be updated.
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