United Airlines experiences widespread system outage, causing hundreds of flight delays

United Airlines on Wednesday night suffered a system outage that impacted hundreds of flights nationwide, leaving some passengers stranded at airports in Denver, Portland and San Francisco for hours.

The issue has since been resolved and flights have resumed, but the incident occurred just weeks after Alaska Airlines grounded all of its flights for about three hours due to an IT issue. 

United said the delays were because of a technological issue that has since been fixed, but there could still be delays as it tries to clear the backlog. 

“We are working with customers to get them to their destinations after a technology disruption on Wednesday evening,” a United Airlines spokesperson told CNN. “The underlying technology issue has been resolved and while we expect residual delays, our team is working to restore our normal operations.”

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said he was briefed on the situation and that it only impacted United Airlines.

"I’ve been briefed by United CEO Scott Kirby on their company’s internal tech outage. The issue was specific to United’s operations, and is unrelated to the broader air traffic control system," he posted on X. "The team at [the Federal Aviation Administration] is in close contact with their systems operations team, and we’ve offered our full support to help them clear up the flight backlog."

Approximately 34% of United Airlines' flights were delayed on Wednesday, per FlightAware, and 1% were canceled at time of publishing. 

Misty Severi is a news reporter for Just The News. You can follow her on X for more coverage.