Travelers with tickets for United Airlines flights were stopped cold at US airports this morning, due to a system-wide computer glitch. Starting around 7:30 am ET, passengers were unable to check in for their flights and all United planes not currently in the air were grounded. The Federal Aviation Administration said the cause was “automation issues.”
In an email to Quartz, United spokesman Charles Hobart said: “We experienced a network connectivity issue this morning. We are working to resolve this and apologize to our customers for any inconvenience.”
For the next hour and a half, aggravated ticket-holders took to Twitter—noting that the airline experienced a similar failure on June 2 and complaining that airline representatives were not adequately communicating with passengers about the outage.
The Atlantic’s James Fallows, who has written extensively about aviation, was among the stranded:
United was not immediately available for comment, and has not addressed the outage on its own Twitter account.
This is a developing story. Updates will be posted as they become available.