The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued an updated advisory Tuesday evening scaling back the nationwide ground stop on American Airlines flights after a systemwide IT outage disrupted operations across the carrier's network.
The revised FAA advisory limited restrictions to Charlotte Douglas International Airport (CLT) in North Carolina, one of the airline's largest hubs, signaling that the nationwide order has been lifted and allowing most American Airlines flights to resume.
American Airlines also issued updates saying system "connectivity has been fully restored" with flights "departing again."
"A technology issue briefly impacted connectivity for some of our systems on Tuesday evening," the airline said. "Connectivity has been fully restored. We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience. We appreciate the efforts of our team to bring our systems back online so quickly and take care of our customers."
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According to the updated FAA notices, CLT remains under restrictions as American Airlines works through a significant backlog of flights.
Certain incoming American Airlines flights bound for Charlotte are being held at their origin airports because of heavy congestion.
Ground delays for flights arriving in Charlotte have increased significantly, with average delays climbing from 24 minutes to 49 minutes. Many flights could face substantially longer delays.
The notice also said there is a 30% to 60% chance the localized ground stop in Charlotte will be extended beyond its scheduled end time.
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The airline previously acknowledged the outage and said its IT team was working to restore affected systems as quickly as possible.
"We put a temporary ground stop in place while our teams worked to resolve the issue. We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience," American Airlines said.
"Our team's working hard to get everyone back on track asap, and we're sorry for the inconvenience," the air carrier added.
The airline has not said what caused the outage.
According to an FAA advisory, the nationwide ground stop began at approximately 6:29 p.m. ET and affected American Airlines and its regional affiliates.
