United Airlines resumed normal operations after a nationwide ground stop late on Tuesday, September 23. The airline had asked the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to halt all departing flights in the United States and Canada due to a connectivity failure just before midnight Central Time. The disruption lasted about 30 minutes before engineers restored critical functions.
A United spokesperson explained that the problem was related to systems required for processing departures. "The full stop lasted approximately 30 minutes, and the operational impact was not as severe as it could have been, given the time that it occurred." However, residual delays were expected, especially at Western hubs where many flights were still operating during the incident.
This marks the second significant technology issue for United Airlines in just over a month. In August, a similar outage delayed over 1,000 flights at major airports such as Newark, Denver, Houston, and Chicago. At that time, United described the situation as a “controllable delay,” though disruptions continued into the following day and compensation was provided to affected customers.