United Airlines said a "technology issue" prompted it to issue a ground stop Wednesday evening that impacted major airports including Newark, Chicago and Denver. The disruption started a little after 6 p.m. ET Wednesday and halted flights for hours, causing significant delays and cancellations.

A technical outage affecting United Airlines' Unimatic system led to a nationwide ground stop, halting all mainline departures and causing significant delays at major hubs. The outage disrupted critical operations, including flight tracking and baggage processing, and left passengers waiting for hours both on the tarmac and inside terminals. 

United Airlines confirmed that the incident was not cybersecurity-related. The disruption resulted in hundreds of delayed flights and forced cancellations, particularly for flights that could not reach their destinations. Communication from staff helped keep passengers informed, mitigating some frustration during the extended delays.

Tech issue grounds United Airlines flights

Welcome to a very busy Chicago here. Our apologies for the type of operation we're having today. It was not the welcome tens of thousands of United passengers wanted after landing Wednesday evening in Chicago or across the country. No United mainline right now is moving. A system outage halted departures, prompting ground stops at several key United hubs nationwide, delaying hundreds of flights coast to coast while others arrived at their destinations, only to wait for hours in what amounted to a traffic jam on the tarmac. The system, known as Unimatic, feeds information to other airline systems, including those calculating the weight and balance of departing planes and tracking flight times. It's critical to the safe operation of United. Airline analyst Henry Hartevelt. Airlines, they usually have backup systems, and that's why this is very unusual, that there was no backup for the Unimatic system when whatever caused it to fail, failed. That failure also prevented some from checking their bags. I went to the self-check, and it wouldn't process my luggage through to my final destinations. Between all of the time spent waiting for agents and stuff, I missed my flight. Raphael Bentham's flight was in the air when the outage happened. He landed safely in Denver, but it took more than two hours for a gate to open up. Communication really helped because people were actually caught. So that was surprising to me. For my plane, it was not very frustrating. People were calm because they were being told what was going on. Frustrating night for flyers. Now, Secretary Duffy says he's been in touch with United's CEO about this issue. United says it is not cybersecurity-related. Those delays and cancellations this morning largely have to do with planes that didn't make it to their final destination last night, so they had to cancel those first-of-the-morning flights, including here in Indianapolis.

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