United Airlines passengers across the country found themselves stranded, confused, and angry on Wednesday as a massive technology failure triggered a nationwide grounding of flights. The culprit: Unimatic, a decades-old internal system so vital to United’s operations that when it failed, the airline had no choice but to bring the entire operation to a standstill.
From major hubs in Chicago, Newark, Denver, Houston, to San Francisco, the outage rippled through the airline’s scheduling, flight tracking, and aircraft balancing systems. An alert on the Federal Aviation Administration’s website confirmed that all United flights destined for Chicago were halted at their departing airports. The FAA later expanded the notice to cover several other key airports.
“Safety is our top priority, and we’ll work with our customers to get them to their destinations,” United said in a brief email statement. But for the more than 1,000 delayed flights and over 60 cancellations, the reality was grim. Passengers reported hours-long waits on tarmacs, missed connections, and sleepless nights in unfamiliar terminals.
By nightfall, United confirmed that the underlying technical problem had been resolved and that systems were being gradually restored. Yet recovery would take time. The domino effect of one system crashing created residual delays across the country. Customers, many of them stranded with no clarity, aired their frustrations online.
“Hey there, we apologize for the travel disruption today,” United responded to one irate passenger on social media platform X. “Our teams are working to resolve the outage as quickly as possible.”
... continue reading