United suffers 2nd major grounding in 2 months

United Airlines confirmed on its Twitter account that it experienced a “network connectivity issue” and apologised to customers “for any inconvenience”. She also reported that router problem has been fixed, and normal operations have resumed.

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No arriving flights into Palm Springs were affected.

Airlines work on a just-in-time policy and a delay of hours like this will throw all of its schedules out of whack. Waivers were available for passengers who could change their flight plans, the airline said. The flight tracking website showed United had 1,600 delays and 48 cancellations worldwide on Wednesday. According to Fox News, The Wall Street Journal’s homepage was also temporarily down.

“We recognize that we didn’t meet your expectations and this did not make for an overall positive experience”, the email from United Airlines VP of customers Sandra Pineau-Boddison reads. The world’s second-largest airline suffered a similar incident on June 2, when a lack of “proper dispatch information” forced a halt in USA takeoffs for less than an hour.

United never specified the cause, though the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) labeled it as an “automation issue” – the same language used when the agency issued a temporary ground stop for Wednesday’s outage.

United Airlines does expect delays to continue into the evening following the two hour shutdown this morning. However, the duration of the ground stop this time was much more compared to last month.

But the problems from Wednesday morning’s glitch at United will likely to ripple throughout the day and even into Thursday, said James Record, a professor of aviation at Dowling College. At least one of those flights was headed to Newark, N.J.

“I am more frustrated than anything”, said Jay Mitchell, an executive-search consultant who was booked to fly to Houston from Fort Lauderdale, Fla. “We’re looking forward to getting home”. “They didn’t give us a warning, not at all”, said Kaufmann. “We should be good”. The national glitch slightly affected the local airport.