American Airlines experienced a major systems outage that disrupted operations. Reports indicated that passengers had trouble accessing boarding passes, while airport agents were unable to print them or verify flight details. The systems were reportedly restored around 7:35 PM Eastern, with flights expected to resume gradually but with delays. Does anyone know whether the outage was caused by expired certificates, DNS, or a broader network problem?
3 Answers
The early word was that this may have been a firewall or BGP networking issue that affected multiple systems at once. That would explain why boarding passes, agent tools, and flight verification all went down together. It’s still best treated as an unconfirmed internal report until the airline publishes a post-incident explanation.
There’s no solid evidence that DNS or expired certificates caused this. DNS is an easy theory whenever many services stop working, but the symptoms could also come from routing, firewalls, identity services, or another shared dependency. The outage appeared to affect airport operations broadly rather than just one public website.
Exactly. Saying “it was DNS” without logs is mostly a joke at this point. The actual cause needs to come from the airline’s incident review.
Passengers who had already boarded or were already in the air were generally fine, but people at the airport could have trouble displaying mobile boarding passes. Agents reportedly couldn’t print passes or verify reservations, so even if flights resumed, delays were expected while the systems came back online.
That kind of failure would definitely be a rough day for the networking team. A shared edge or routing problem could make several otherwise separate applications appear to fail simultaneously.