Network problems delay flights at two oneworld Alliance airlines

Earlier in the week, American Airlines was forced to ground flights for up to an hour on Christmas Eve, one of the busiest travel days of the year.

American asked US Federal Aviation Administration to issue a “nationwide groundstop” at 6:50 am Eastern Time on Tuesday, preventing any of its aircraft from flying. The advisory was lifted an hour later.

Vendor technology issue

The airline blamed the problems on a “vendor technology issue” in a message sent from its official X/Twitter account. The issue was in networking equipment managed by DXC Technologies, according to an American Airlines statement cited by several news outlets.

Neither DXC nor American immediately responded to our requests for comment.

American has been working with DXC to modernize mainframe systems using a devops approach, according to a blog post by its in-house technology team.

In a separate modernization initiative, it also transformed its analytics tools, so it should be well placed to evaluate the consequences of Tuesday morning’s outage.