American Airlines is briefly suspending flights nationwide after a technical problem

American Airlines briefly grounded flights nationwide Tuesday due to a technical issue, just as the Christmas travel season kicks into high gear.

American flights were cleared to fly by federal regulators about an hour after a national ground stop order was issued by federal regulators.

Just before 7 a.m. Eastern Time, the Federal Aviation Administration ordered all American Airlines flights grounded in the United States at the airline’s request. American had reported a technical problem affecting its entire system with millions traveling for the holiday.

The ground stop lasted, according to the time stamps on the FAA’s order, exactly one hour.

American did not elaborate on what technical problem caused the flights, and the airline did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The grounding could not come at a worse time for the millions of travelers expected to fly over the next 10 days. The Transportation Security Administration expects to screen 40 million passengers over the holidays and through January 2.

Many flights during the holidays are sold out, making cancellations even more disruptive than during slower periods. Even with just a brief outage, the cancellations have a cascading effect that can take days to clean up.

In December 2022, Southwest Airlines stranded 2 million travelersand Delta Air Lines suffered a minor but significant meltdown after a worldwide technological failure in July caused by a faulty software update from the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike.

Southwest was ordered to pay a $35 million fine as part of a $140 million settlement to resolve a federal investigation into the 2022 Christmas debacle.

Excluding the settlement, the country’s fourth-largest airline by revenue said the meltdown cost it more than 1.1 billion in refunds and refunds, extra costs and lost ticket sales over several months.