American Airlines has grounded its entire fleet until at least 4 p.m. Central as it works to fix a massive computer system outage already responsible for widespread flight delays.
The Fort Worth, Texas-based airline said on Twitter Tuesday afternoon that its system that handles reservations and bookings, Sabre, is offline. Passengers also took to Twitter to express frustration. Employees at American were responding personally to many of them. American first reported the outage around noon Central.
Flight tracking service FlightAware is showing delays of more than an hour at O'Hare. Delays earlier had averaged 2.5 hours.
American said it was working to repair the system but didn't estimate a time that it would be restored. A spokeswoman didn't elaborate.
American says it will offer refunds or make changes for free (instead of the usual $150) for passengers that were set to fly Tuesday. But it's not able to make changes to those reservations until the computer system is up and running. The airline was telling passengers on Twitter to call its reservation line at (800) 433-7300.
Reservation and bookings systems are an airline's backbone and little can be done when they're malfunctioning.
The outage has much the same effect for passengers as the problems United Airlines experienced through its combination with Continental.
American, operated by AMR Corp., is the nation's third-largest after United and Delta, carrying an about 275,000 passengers on 3,400 flights a day.
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