Technical breakdown leaves American Airlines travelers temporarily unable to manage flights | Official Website of Louis Velazquez, entrepreneur, finance guy and tech innovator

As the software used to manage a carrier’s flight bookings and ticket sales, airline reservation systems (ARS) are a computerized network that tracks flight schedules and inventory both internally and directly to consumers.

On the latter end, the traveler is able to see flights that are available for booking and manages existing reservations.

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The airline’s internal inventory control is presented in a digestible way to the consumer to search for available fights and their fares while most are also integrated with global distribution systems (GDS) to allow travel agencies and tour operators to book flights for their customers.

Throughout June 2, American Airlines AAL was experiencing a booking system outage that left customers temporarily unable to either book new flights or manage existing ones. The outage extended both to the airline’s website and mobile app and did not affect carriers such as Delta DAL, United Airlines UAL and Southwest Airlines LUV.

American Airlines experienced a booking system outage for approximately four hours on June 2.

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‘Our system is having trouble’: Technical outage lasts approximately four hours

For approximately four hours on June 2, users who tried to access their flights on either the American Airlines website or mobile app were met with a pop-up window reading “our system is having trouble.”

American Airlines acknowledged the outage and said that it came as a result of a “vendor-related issue.” TheStreet has reached out to American Airlines for comment on the situation.

While the airline did not elaborate on which vendor or issue caused the problem, Sabre Corporation is the company that provides its SabreSonic Passenger Service System for the booking platform. The cloud technology company provides passenger systems for a number of airlines such as JetBlue Airways JBLU and Alaska Airlines ALK.

As airlines will delegate their passenger service systems (PSS) to third-handling parties specializing in the necessary technology, glitches can prove devastating to operations due to the time and highly specific technical knowledge required to resolve them.

After several hours of disruption, American Airlines booking system restored

The AA booking system was restored by the end of June 2 but the outage still caused significant disruption to both new bookings and existing ones as travelers were left unable to check in online which in turn resulted in longer wait times at multiple airports.

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Travelers from the American Airlines hub at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport (DFW) in particular experienced the highest numbers of delays and difficulties accessing the online system.

In the summer of 2024, Delta Air Lines has experienced a breakdown over an automatic software update from its cybersecurity provider CrowdStrike. The airline ended up suing the technology company over the financial losses related to having to cancel over 7,000 flights at airports across the U.S. over the course of several days.

The lawsuit came as a result of the passengers and travel operators that had already begun suing the airline over the cancelations they in turn had sustained. On May 19, the Fulton County Superior Court in Georgia authorized Delta to proceed with a lawsuit to establish whether CrowdStrike displayed gross negligence and can be held accountable for initiating a Falcon software that proved to be defective.