United Airlines briefly grounded all flights out of the United States and Canada on Wednesday for the second time in two months. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) told the Daily Beast in an email statement that “United requested the ground stop for their fleet early this morning.” The airline, which operates 4,000 to 5,000 flights daily, cited “brief connectivity issue just before midnight Central time on Tuesday” as the reason for the grounding in an email statement to the Daily Beast. Normal operations resumed approximately 36 minutes later. “During routine maintenance, our ability to connect to our technology network failed,” the statement read. “Connections were quickly restored using backup systems.” United also clarified that the recent outage was unrelated to the prior grounding incident or any cybersecurity threat. The previous grounding order came on Aug. 6 for major U.S. airports in Chicago, Denver, and Houston, resulting in widespread delays. That grounding lasted for a few hours. According to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy on X, the company’s internal tech outage was “specific to United’s operations,” rather than a “broader air traffic control system.” Alaska Airlines suffered a similar IT outage earlier this year in July, forcing the airline to halt operations for approximately three hours.
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