The American airline United Airlines temporarily paralyzed its takeoffs in the United States on Tuesday due to a computer problem and went so far as to request support from the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to undertake the operation.
The alert, which went off at approximately one in the afternoon Washington time (18:00 GMT) and lasted for an hour, put the FAA in a state of alarm, which was asked to authorize the ground stop of all the airline's aircraft in the United States.
"We are experiencing a system-wide technology issue and are holding all aircraft at their departure airports. Flights already in the air continue to their destination as scheduled," United Airlines said in its statement before reporting minutes later. that they had detected and resolved the setback.
An FAA report mentions that United crews were unable to communicate with controllers through normal means. The FAA says the problem has been limited to United and its subsidiaries.
According to the company's latest update, they are now working to "resume flights" and to get "affected customers" to their destinations "as soon as possible."
United Airlines' technological problem even alerted the US Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, who, through a post on the social network X (formerly Twitter), said before the problem was fixed that it remained " aware" about the "cause and scope" of it.
Shares of Chicago-based United Airlines Holdings Inc. were hit by news of the suspension of operations and have fallen more than 3%.
