United Airlines revealed the cause of its sudden technical outage overnight, saying it wasn’t the result of a cyberattack.
All departures in North America were briefly halted overnight but lasted less than one hour, it said.
United ‘experienced a brief connectivity issue just before midnight Central Time on Tuesday,’ it said.
It said the outage was caused by maintenance being conducted at the time.
“During routine maintenance, our ability to connect to our technology network failed. Connections were quickly restored using backup systems,” United said.
It follows a much more extensive outage last month for United when it was placed on a ground stop leading to more than 200 flight cancellations.
This took several hours to resolve.
The latest outage was unrelated and was not caused by any cyberattack, United said.
Just a few hours later, American Airlines also suffered an outage.
It was revealed as ‘a technical issue impacting some of our maintenance applications.’
Dozens of flights were canceled Wednesday morning and hundreds were delayed.
In a Wednesday afternoon update American said: “Our team is utilizing alternative procedures for closing out flights, which is resulting in some delayed departures.”
