A “technology issue” grounded United Airlines flights at Newark Liberty International Airport and other airports nationwide on Wednesday night, according to a statement from the airline.
“Due to a technology issue, we are holding United mainline flights at their departure airports,” the statement said.
The system impacted is called Unimatic, which stores information about each flight that is then fed to other systems, including those that calculate weight and balance and tracks flight times, the airline said.
A tweet from Newark airport also confirmed the delays and attributed them to a system outage affecting United Airlines flights.
The outage began at 4:12 p.m. and was resolved within a few hours, although residual delays continued into Wednesday night, officials said.
United said at 9:50 p.m. that the underlying issue had been resolved and that while residual delays were expected, crews were working to restore normal operations.
“Safety is our top priority, and we’ll work with our customers to get them to their destinations,” the airline said in a statement.
Travelers at Newark airport were asked to check with their airline to determine the status of their flight.
The airline said it paid customer expenses, such as hotels, when applicable.
This outage was not related to recent concerns about cybersecurity in the airline industry, United said.
Other affected airports include San Francisco, Chicago, Denver, and Houston, according to a report by ABC7.
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Chris Sheldon may be reached at [email protected].
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