American Airlines: FAA Grounds All Flights Due to Computer Glitch

American Airlines is experiencing the mother of all computer outages today. The computer glitch has reaped havoc on their reservation system which prompted the FAA to ground all AA flights until at least 4:00pm CT. 

The status boards, used to determine if flights have arrived or departed, failed to provide any up-to-date information regarding flight status. Andrea Huguely, a spokesperson for American Airlines said the problem was due to their reservation tool. “American’s reservation and booking tool, Sabre, is offline, we’re working to resolve the issue as quickly as we can.  We apologize to our customers for any inconvenience.” 

By midday, American had canceled seven flights and was experiencing delays on more than 50 others, according to FlightStats.com The situation has obviously deteriorated. 

"At 1 pm they basically stopped dispatching new flights, stopped boarding new flights, stopped allowing people to check in And they've announced that they are not going to resume new flight operations until 5:00 pm," FlightAware CEO Daniel Baker told CNBC.

The grounding of these flights could effect upwards of 100,000 people. American Airlines is the third largest airlines in America with over 3,400 flights daily.