By rssfeeds-admin Residual delays and cancellations continued Thursday morning for United Airlines flyers at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport after one of the airline’s computer systems went down Wednesday night, triggering a host of issues for travelers nationwide.
According to the FAA, all United Airlines flights bound for O’Hare were grounded at their departing airports Wednesday night. So far Thursday morning, the FAA is not reporting any ground stops across the nation, but United Airlines was still playing catch-up at O’Hare.
In addition to travelers in Chicago, United Airlines passengers in Denver, Newark, Houston and San Francisco were also impacted by the ground stop.
In a statement, the airline confirmed that the delays and cancellations stemmed from a technology issue that began just before 5:15 p.m. Wednesday and was solved by around 10 p.m.
“We are working with customers to get them to their destinations after a technology disruption on Wednesday evening. The underlying technology issue has been resolved, and while we expect residual delays, our team is working to restore our normal operations,” a spokesperson for the airline said.
According to the airline, the issues stemmed from a problem with a system named Unimatic, which houses information about each flight that is then fed to other systems, including those that calculate weight and balance and track flight times.
The airline added that the outage was not related to recent “concerns about cybersecurity in the airline industry.”
WGN-TV heard from some passengers stuck on planes on the tarmac at O’Hare for nearly three hours waiting to take off or de-board their flights Wednesday night. One traveler said their pilot told them the airport’s traffic, monitoring, taxiing, landing and disembarking systems were all nonfunctional.
Some planes even had to be manually pulled to gates until the issue could be resolved, according to passengers.
WGN-TV also spoke with a woman and her daughter whose flight was ultimately canceled.
“We’re supposed to go to Burlington, Vermont, where our grandparents are. We were going to do some family visit, college visit, but no longer,” traveler Holden Brooks said.
“… Probably bus it back to Milwaukee and regroup.”
Another passenger said United Airlines offered them $200 for hotel reimbursement.
One man also said that at around 8:15 p.m., the pilot of his plane said the systems are coming back online and that planes should be moving again soon.
Brooks, meanwhile, said it was difficult to get updates from the airline on what the issue was.
“The internet had more news than customer service did,” she said.
The FAA added that Denver, Newark, Houston and San Francisco were also impacted by the ground stop Wednesday, though it’s unclear if issues continued in those areas on Thursday morning.
Discover more from RSS Feeds Cloud
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.