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FAA: All US United Continental Flights Grounded

An airport spokeswoman says computer delays usually don’t last long, and there is nothing the airport can do because it is totally airline-related.

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The airline also waived change fees for affected customers.

The only flight from United scheduled for arrival this morning is one from Houston at 10:15 AM.

United Airlines said on Wednesday it was restoring operations after all its flights were grounded for about two hours due to computer problems. Those outages caused hundreds of flights to be delayed.

The glitch forced United to ground all of its flights worldwide at about 8 a.m. Wednesday.

A big issue, Deull said, “is if they lost an hour of productivity this morning, they can’t structure the day so everyone just works until midnight because of rules on the number of hours of duty time they can have”.

In June, an issue with United’s computer system caused the carrier to ground all USA flights for around 30 minutes.

The Chicago-based carrier has struggled with occasional computer faults since the 2010 merger between ex- parent UAL Corp. and Continental Airlines created the current parent company, United Continental.

Details of the computer problem were not immediately available.

An industry analyst said the grounding will frustrate Air Canada (TSX:AC) passengers travelling on codeshare with United, but have little lasting impact on United or its Canadian partner. High-paying business travelers were outraged; United CEO Jeff Smisek apologized for failing to provide good customer service.

About 3,500 flights were affected, according to NBC News.

Intercontinental Exchange Inc’s (ICE.N) NYSE Group, which includes the New York Stock Exchange, said on Tuesday it temporarily suspended trading in all of securities on its exchanges following earlier reports of technical difficulties.

United Airlines dropped 1.4% on Wednesday morning following the glitch but the broader market always down as well.

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Gary Leff, co-founder of frequent-flier website MilePoint, said the breakdown “underscores the sense that something is very wrong at United”.

Trading resumes on NYSE after nearly 4-hour outage - KUSI News - San Diego