American Airlines flights halted nationwide amid massive IT outage

American Airlines held flights at airports across the country Tuesday as it dealt with what it called a systemwide IT outage.

An alert from the FAA's Operational Information System indicated that all flights not yet airborne would be held at their gates because of the outage, which hit the airline's technological infrastructure. By 6:20 p.m. CT, the FAA said the ground stop had been lifted at most U.S. airports, though flights were still being held in Charlotte.

An American Airlines spokesperson said a technology issue briefly affected connectivity for some of its systems, adding that systems were coming back online and flights were departing again. The airline said it had put a temporary ground stop in place while teams worked to resolve the problem and apologized to customers.

The disruption reached beyond the tarmac. American said it could not provide service on its mobile apps for customers trying to book or change flights, and it was also unable to answer calls to its customer service lines.