UPDATE: All United Airlines flights resumed late Wednesday morning.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, this situation was not the result of a hack.
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From Denver, to Washington D.C. to Hartford, Connecticut, thousands of passengers are being told that their United Airlines flight is grounded due to an unknown “computer glitch.”
Currently the company line is that the major airline is struggling with an “automation issue” that has more than 3,500 flights nationwide on a ground halt.
The company released a statement at 9am EST saying: “We experienced a network connectivity issue this morning, we are working to resolve this and apologize to our customers for any inconvenience.”
Given the string of high profile hacks over the past year, many experts are wondering out loud if this major air travel backup is in fact due to a cyber attack. Just last month 1,400 flights were cancelled when a Polish state airline had its systems hacked.
Strangely this outage comes roughly two months after United released it’s ‘bug bounty’ program – 1 million frequent flyer miles to whoever could hack their systems. It’s unclear if this had anything to do with the outage.
No word yet on when flights will resume, however the airline urges passengers to use extra time when getting to the airport and to make sure you have a hard copy of your boarding pass – many airports are stating that you will not be allowed through security without it.
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United Airlines instituted a worldwide ground stop Wednesday morning after its computer system suffered a technical glitch, causing a ripple effect of heavy delays throughout major airports.
About 3,500 flights were being affected. The ripple effect of delays could reach 235 domestic and 138 international destinations.
“We experienced a network connectivity issue this morning,” United confirmed in a statement after 9 a.m. “We are working to resolve this and apologize to our customers for any inconvenience.”
