American Airlines Now Reboarding Flights after Nationwide Ground stop

American Airlines Undergoing Technical Issues, Grounded, Now Re-Boarding Again

American Airlines has resumed boarding its flights after temporarily grounding all flights nationwide early on Christmas Eve morning due to a "technical issue."

At the airline's request, the Federal Aviation Administration issued a nationwide ground stop for all American Airlines flights on Tuesday morning.

Passengers started reporting on social media that some flights were returning to their gates and experiencing delays of around 90 minutes.

American Airlines had said it a "technical issue" caused delays for all its flights in the United States. However, the airline started boarding flights again around 8 a.m. ET, according to spokeswoman Sarah Jantz.

Later on Tuesday morning, American Airlines updated its statement, explaining that the issue was due to a problem with a vendor's technology. The problem has since been fixed, and flights are now running again.

“We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience,” American Airlines said in a statement.

“Expect some delays throughout the day but we’re working to mitigate those and avoid cancels,” Jantz said. “We have a smaller schedule today and have the staffing to support the quick recovery.”

The issue happened on a busy day when American Airlines had over 3,300 domestic flights scheduled. According to FlightAware, only 26 flights across all airlines were canceled nationwide. However, more than 1,000 flights in and out of the U.S. were delayed. The increase in delays may not only be due to the American Airlines outage but also because of airport congestion and winter weather affecting the Northeast.