If you’ve flown with United Airlines anytime within the past few months or just keep an eye on aviation news in general, you’ve likely noticed an uptick in groundings and canceled flights. It’s always an immensely annoying process when your flight gets grounded for issues that are entirely outside of your control, or any of the beleaguered gate agents and airline employees. No one is happy.
On the night of September 24th, United Airlines grounded all of its flights in the United States and Canada for 30 minutes. On the surface, half an hour doesn’t seem like much, but when you consider the fact that there were 42 flights grounded and four were outright canceled, it’s a bigger deal than it seems. The airline told NBC News that the disruption was caused by a “connectivity issue” over the entirety of United’s North American operations.
While it’s an issue more complicated than simply resetting a router, normal operations started up again after 36 minutes. Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time an incident like this has happened.
This is the second United Airlines issue after another tech issue in early August 2025 caused well over 1,000 delays and several cancellations. Other than calling it a “major computer system outage,” according to NPR, United has yet to divulge the nature of that specific issue. United Airlines’ public-facing press release website didn’t make any mention of the incident’s cause.
Airline operations are incredibly complex and must be precise to keep passengers and crews safe aboard the hundreds or even thousands of aircraft in the sky, so it makes logical sense that something as small as a tech glitch or connectivity issue would bring the operations to a halt. Given the general state of air travel, commercial airline companies have redundancies in place to prevent issues like this, but sometimes there’s no amount of preparedness that will eliminate all possible delays and cancellations.
Delta Air Lines suffered a system outage in the summer of 2024, resulting in thousands of cancellations. Technology makes everything easier but it also brings with it more headaches.