United Continental Holdings Inc. (NYSE: UAL) experienced technical difficulties Wednesday morning and was forced to halt its flights temporarily. Currently, flights have resumed and systems are back online, but the damage has been done.
The company announced that all of its flights in the United States were grounded Wednesday morning due to a computer problem. According to the company, the problem was related to “network connectivity.”
According to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the flights were grounded because of an outage in the check-in system. Reportedly, ticket agents in some cases were forced to check in passengers using just pen and paper.
Chicago radio station WGN reported that the ground stop did not impact United Express, the regional carrier for United Continental.
This was not the only time that United had to halt flights recently. The airline had a similar situation in early June when it was temporarily (less than an hour) forced to halt all takeoffs due to “automation issues.”
As of 10:00 a.m. E.T., United noted that the most recent issue had been resolved.
So far on the year, United stock has not performed well at all. Shares are down nearly 19% year to date. However, the boost from falling oil prices last year have kept this major airline well above water and up about 40% in the past 52 weeks.
Shares of United were down 2.3% at $53.07 on Wednesday morning, even after the flights had resumed. The stock has a consensus analyst price target of $76.83 and a 52-week trading range of $39.24 to $74.52.
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