United Airlines Grounds Entire Fleet Due To Technical Issue
United Airlines has grounded their entire worldwide fleet (except for regional jets in some locations) due to a technical glitch. According to this NBC News article:
United Airlines grounded all flights worldwide Wednesday morning after its computer system suffered a technical glitch, causing a ripple effect of heavy delays throughout major airports.
About 3,500 flights were being affected. The delays could reach 235 domestic and 138 international destinations.
“We experienced a network connectivity issue this morning,” United confirmed in a statement after 9 a.m. “We are working to resolve this and apologize to our customers for any inconvenience.”
The Federal Aviation Administration specifically blamed the ground stop on “automation issues.”
It’s not the first time United has had large technical glitches. Unfortunately, I don’t think it will be the last. If you’re traveling soon, plan accordingly for delays as most planes are full and this is likely to cause a bit of havoc. Thanks to Neil M. for sending this my way.
ETA: It appears as of 10:15am EDT the ground stop is starting to lift.
Love the “apologize for any inconvenience.” That’s pretty lame for a systemwide failure that causes every single passenger a huge inconvenience.
02nz, yeah. I understand technical failures happen, but they seem to happen quite a bit for United. Just batty how many problems they’ve had since the merger.
Wow, twice in just over a month. That’s impressive!
Charlie, UA needs some tech help. Want to volunteer?
Yeah, I just read the headline and texted our common friend, Dag (who has aged significantly since the merger) and he doesn’t want to SHARE the blame with the rest of his fellow employees. 😉
Dag could have been an infant at the time of the merger and still be old and gray now. Make sure to tell him we still love him. Other parts of the Empire, not so much.
No thanks! I can only imagine what their code looks like. Have they ever done a complete rewrite? I bet at least some of it that dates back to the early 80’s.
Charlie, the fact that they haven’t done a rewrite is probably a large part of the issue.
Maybe worth mentioning that the issue is with their computer network, not with their planes.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/23808772/ns/travel-news/t/american-airlines-grounds-fleet-md-s/#.VZ05bpNVhBc
Tommy, the article I quoted in the post says “United Airlines grounded all flights worldwide Wednesday morning after its computer system suffered a technical glitch”.