A technology issue with United Airlines internal systems prompted the Airline on Wednesday to cancel and delay flights at major airports across the country.
According to United, the outage occurred early Wednesday evening when the airline began halting departures at major hubs in Chicago, Denver, Houston, and Newark, New Jersey. The issue was a disruption with United’s Unimatic system, which houses and feeds flight information to other systems including information that determines an aircraft’s weight and balance.
The issue was resolved hours later around 10 pm, at which time more than 1,000 flights had been delayed and hundreds cancelled. The airline cancelled almost 7 percent of its flights as a result of the technical issues.
Residual problems bled into the following day, as continued operational hiccups caused the company to issue another string of delays. On Thursday, United delayed more than 800 flights across the U.S. and cancelled another 175 according to the flight tracking service, FlightAware.
In response to the flight disruptions, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duff released a statement on X.com, explaining that the outage was not related to security issues or problems with the air traffic control system.
“I’ve been briefed by United CEO Scott Kirby on their company’s internal tech outage. The issue was specific to United’s operations, and is unrelated to the broader air traffic control system,” Duffy wrote.
USA Today reported that United is treating the disruptions as “controllable” versus “non-controllable.” Speaking in regulatory terms, “controllable” means that affected passengers are entitled to some compensation when applicable. United has stated they paid hotel expenses for customers that were forced to stay in cities overnight due to cancellations.
As of Friday morning, things seemed to have returned to the norm operationally for United and its customers, with departures and cancellations dropping precipitously from the previous two days.
