Why United Had To Suspend All US And Canadian Flights (And Why They Might Do It Again)
United Airlines has been working to modernize its airplanes with technology like free Wi-Fi, but it turns out that even the most up-to-date planes still might have to stay on the ground at times. On September 23, United called for a brief ground stop of all of its planes leaving from the U.S. and Canada. As for what happened, the airline gave a fairly vague response, saying that it had "experienced a brief connectivity issue just before midnight Central time on Tuesday, Sept. 23 but has since resumed normal operations," according to an email the airline sent to USA Today.
The brief pause impacted a number of flights with delays and even some cancellations, particularly at LAX. That's around the time of day when red-eye flights leave for the East Coast, even though LAX might be a sleep-friendly airport, our guess is that there were some upset passengers spending more time there than they would have liked.
Something similar happened on August 6 with the airline halting flights for a couple of hours in the U.S. At that time, the "technology disruption" caused a delay for more than 1,000 flights, per AP News. It impacted some of the airline's major hubs, including Newark Liberty International Airport, which had its own separate spate of cancellations back in May. The two incidents with United are reportedly unrelated, but coming within less than two months of each other, it seems like there's potential for more unexpected stops.
People noticed United's delays, and that wasn't the only airline who had issues that day
People on social media have responded to the grounding of United flights due to fairly vague technology-related reasons in both August and in September. One person on X (formerly known as Twitter) said, "Tech glitches: the new turbulence." Another posted, "A nationwide ground stop is no small thing. That kind of tech outage shows how fragile the system can be." And one critic joked: "At this point it's not even a glitch, it's part of their monthly subscription plan. Imagine buying a ticket and having to pray the WiFi gods let the plane leave on time."
September 23 wasn't a great day for U.S. airlines. Along with the United pause in service, American Airlines also experienced what a rep described as "a technical issue impacting some of our maintenance applications," per The Hill. It's not clear if, or how many flights were delayed or cancelled because of the technical issue with American. Of course, we know it's a matter of safety, and we want the airlines to pause things if everything isn't going right, but here's hoping all the airlines have things worked out for the upcoming holiday season since Thanksgiving and Christmas are some of the busiest flying times.