American Airlines, Facebook hit with major outages

SAN FRANCISCO

Beginning at roughly 2:10 p.m., Facebook users began noting that the service was down. Facebook revealed that a major outage knocked out its service across the board, although most of the issues were resolved within the hour.

Thursday’s Facebook outage is the first major technical issue the site has experienced in many months. Facebook has not commented on cause of the problem.

Earlier this week, Twitter experienced a huge outage that knocked out service in North America and Europe. Three days after the problem occurred, the microblogging service has not revealed its cause.

A computer systems outage forced American Airlines to ground many airplanes Thursday as social media giant Facebook was taken down briefly for many users around the world.

The American outage began around noon EST (GMT 16:00) and caused the company to ground all flights into and out of at least three of its major hubs. The Federal Aviation Administration announced at approximately 1:30 p.m. that all American traffic arriving or departing from Dallas, Chicago and Miami would be halted and travelers should expect major delays.

The computer outage also affected the airline’s website and knocked out access to customer data.

A little more than two hours after the trouble began, the ground stop was lifted and flights left the airports, but not after the carrier’s social media feeds filled up with complaints from angry customers. According to flight-tracking service FlightAware, more than 260 American Airlines flights were delayed and five were cancelled.

“We apologize for the inconvenience and are working to get our customers on their way as soon as possible,” American said in a statement.

The American outage Thursday is reminiscent of two massive groundings that hit rival United Airlines earlier this year. A computer glitch in July caused United to ground its entire fleet – 4,900 planes – across the globe.