American Airlines halted departures at airports throughout the United States on Tuesday evening after a technology failure disrupted connectivity across the carrier's systems, with Colorado among the states touched by wider aviation disruptions the same night.
The ground stop lasted under an hour before flights were allowed to resume. The halt took effect near 6:30 p.m. Eastern Time and the situation began to clear up not long after. The cause of the outage was not immediately established, though the airline confirmed it had put a temporary ground stop in place while its technical teams worked on a fix.
The airline addressed the disruption publicly on social media. "A technology issue briefly impacted connectivity for some of our systems on Tuesday evening. Systems are coming back online now and flights are departing again," American Airlines said in a post on X. The carrier also offered an apology, stating, "We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience."
Separate from the IT problem, severe weather was already straining the national air travel system that evening. An unusually powerful storm was pushing through the Northeast on Tuesday night. Thunderstorm activity unrelated to the American Airlines outage had already produced ground delays and ground stops at airports across Colorado, Massachusetts, Maryland, Virginia, and New York.
Across the country, more than 2,500 flights were canceled at U.S. airports, according to FlightAware. The New York City airport complex and Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey saw the heaviest impact, with storm-driven ground stops also hitting airports serving Washington, D.C., and Baltimore.
The full scope of delays at Colorado Springs Airport specifically attributable to the American Airlines IT outage had not been separately confirmed as of Tuesday night, and the underlying cause of the technical failure remains under investigation.