American Airlines lifts ground stop, averting Christmas travel nightmare

American Airlines on Tuesday lifted an hour-long ground stop of all its flights in the U.S. due to an unspecified technical issue, the federal aviation regulator said, briefly disrupting Christmas travel for thousands of passengers.

It is the latest technical snag to hit the industry after carriers were hit by a global tech outage tied to Microsoft's Azure cloud platform and a software issue at cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike earlier this year.

The outage cost Delta Air Lines at least $500 million.

Two years ago, Southwest Airlines experienced a meltdown with its systems during the holidays that led to 16,900 flight cancellations and stranded 2 million passengers. It was eventually fined $140 million in the largest-ever civil penalty for a travel disruption.

"A technical issue is affecting American flights this morning. Our teams are working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible, and we apologize to our customers for the inconvenience," American Airlines had said in a statement following the ground stop.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration in a statement referred Reuters to the airline, reiterating that the carrier had reported a technical issue.

American operates thousands of flights per day to more than 350 destinations in more than 60 countries.

Shares of the carrier clawed back lost ground and were marginally down before the bell.

American was responding to comments on X as numerous users posted there, as well as on Bluesky and Facebook.

"Hey, @AmericanAir just tell us whether we should go home or not. Please don't make us wait in the airport for hours," wrote one user.