United Airlines flights in US briefly grounded by 'software update'

Image source, Getty Images

  • Author, Bernd Debusmann Jr
  • Role, 大象传媒 News, Washington

United Airlines has resumed flights after briefly grounding all planes in the US on Tuesday because of a computer glitch.

The carrier said "a software update caused a widespread slowdown in United's technology systems".

Flights already in the air continued to their destination as planned, the airline said.

United said it "identified a fix" to allow its planes to start taking off about an hour later.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) confirmed United had asked the agency to pause all its departures nationwide.

The ground stop was lifted shortly before 14:00 EST (19:00 BST).

Some 211 flights nationwide were delayed by the stoppage.

In January, an FAA computer outage halted departures of all US flights for several hours.