Scores of American Airlines passengers travelling home for Christmas were left disgruntled after technical issues forced the grounding of all flights.
Christmas travellers were filmed trapped in airports across America after they awaited updates over the tannoy.
Due to the high traffic of the Christmas period, delays will be even more severe as most of the holiday tickets are sold out.
It is the industry’s latest high-profile tech failure after the global outage related to Microsoft’s Azure platform and cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike earlier this year.