The U.S. airline United Airlines temporarily paralyzed its takeoffs in the United States due to a computer problem and even asked for support to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA, for its acronym in English) to undertake the operation.
The alert, which went off at approximately one o’clock in the afternoon Washington time (18:00 GMT) and lasted for an hour, even put the FAA on alert, which was asked to authorize the grounding of all the airline’s aircraft in the United States.
“We are experiencing a system-wide technology problem and are holding all aircraft at their departure airports. Flights already in the air are continuing to their destination as scheduled,” United Airlines said in its statement before reporting minutes later that they had detected and resolved the hiccup.
According to the company’s latest update, they are now working to “resume flights” and to get “affected customers” to their destinations “as quickly as possible.”
United Airlines’ technological problem even alerted the U.S. Transportation Secretary himself, Pete Buttigieg, who, through a post on the social network X (formerly Twitter), said before the problem was fixed that he remained “aware” of the “cause and scope” of the problem.