American Airlines grounded all its flights Tuesday afternoon until at least 5 p.m. Eastern time while the carrier tries to resolve a problem accessing its reservations system.
The grounding of flights cones after the company began experiencing nationwide outages in its reservation system.
Following the ground delay, significant to excessive delays began to appear at Chicago O'Hare International Airport, LaGuardia, Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, and Miami International Airport, accordingto Flightstats.
American initially appeared to blame its the crash on a crash of the Sabre reservations system. However, AA eventually backtracked, saying via Twitter that "the issue is (with) our ability to access our res system" and not with Sabre itself.
"American's reservation and booking tool, Sabre is offline," American Airlines spokeswoman Mary Frances Fagan told Reuters.
"We're working to resolve the issue as quickly as we can. We apologize to our customers for any inconvenience."
American said on its official Twitter account that the ground stop is scheduled to last until at least 5 p.m. Eastern time. The order could last longer if the airline's computer-access problems aren't resolved.
American, the AMR Corp unit that plans to merge with rival US Airways Group to form the world's biggest air carrier, operates more than 3,500 daily flights worldwide.
