American Airlines forced to ground all flights after computer system outage

April 17^th, 2013 (InsideCostaRica.com) Computer systems used to run many daily operations at American Airlines failed Tuesday, forcing the carrier to ground all flights across the United States for several hours and stranding thousands of frustrated passengers at airports and on planes.

Flights already in the air were allowed to continue to their destinations, but planes on the ground could not take off.  Travelers could do little to get back in the air until the computer system was fixed.

However, the impact of the outage on Costa Rica was far less than in the United States.  Travelers saw flight delays of about 5 hours, though only one flight was canceled.  The company operates four daily flights to Costa Rica, originating from Miami and Dallas.

American Airlines said that the system was fixed by 4:30 p.m. ET Tuesday, but expects to see further delays and flight cancellations today.

As of mid-afternoon Tuesday, American and its American Eagle subsidiary had canceled more than 700 flights, and another 765 flights were delayed, according to tracking service FlightAware.

Earlier Tuesday, a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration said American asked to halt its flights until 5 p.m. ET. Flights into American’s five biggest cities — New York, Dallas, Los Angeles, Chicago and Miami — were stopped until 5:30 p.m. ET.

American offered to book people who needed to travel yesterday on another airline and pay for the fare difference. For those who wanted to delay their trips, American offered refunds or waivers from the usual fee for changing a reservation.

However, the airline wasn’t able to process those changes and refunds for several hours because the reservation system was down.