UPDATE: American Airlines flights have resumed as of 8 a.m. Wednesday following a requested ground stop earlier in the morning. The ground stop was requested after the airline experienced a technology issue with its Flight Operations System, which the airline uses to release its flights.“We sincerely apologize to our customers for the inconvenience this morning,” American Airlines said in a publicly released statement.

American Airlines has grounded all of its flights on Christmas Eve due to an unspecified “technical issue.”

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) confirmed that the airline requested a ground stoppage for all of its flights, ABC News reported.

Neither the agency nor the airlines has issued an official statement that details what has caused the halt, as of the time of this writing.

“We’re currently experiencing a technical issue with all American Airlines flights,” the company posted on X early Tuesday in response to a customer. “Your safety is our utmost priority, once this is rectified, we’ll have you safely on your way to your destination.”


In response to another frustrated flyer, American Airlines announced that it could not estimate how long the problem might last.

“Our team is currently working to get this done. An estimated timeframe has not been provided, but they’re trying to fix it in the shortest possible time,” the company posted on X.

Most of the company’s responses to other X users concerned apologies for the outage.

One such message read, “Our team is diligently working on restoring the situation. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this has caused you with your travel plans.”

This comes exactly two years after Southwest Airlines suffered a similar outage around Christmas in 2022. The computer system failure that resulted in delayed or canceled flights for over 15,000 flyers resulted in a $140 million penalty from the FAA in 2023, Reuters reported.