All JetBlue flights briefly grounded after request from airline

FILE -A JetBlue passenger jet, front, taxis at Palm Beach International Airport, Sunday, March 30, 2025, in West Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File)

NEW YORK — All JetBlue flights were briefly grounded by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration early Tuesday at the request of the airline as it dealt with a short system outage.

The ground stop was lifted about 40 minutes after it was imposed, the agency said in a notice posted to its website.

“A brief system outage has been resolved and we have resumed operations,” JetBlue said in a statement. The airline did not provide further information.

JetBlue, which was founded more than 25 years ago, has its headquarters in New York City and its flagship terminal at the city’s John F. Kennedy International Airport.

Outages do occur from time to time that impact airline travel. In October Alaska Airlines had to ground its planes for hours because of an information technology outage. Three months earlier, Alaska grounded all of its flights for about three hours after the failure of a critical piece of hardware at a data center.

In August a technology issue prompted United Airlines to ground planes at major U.S. airports and more than 1,000 flights were delayed. The system outage, as the company described it, lasted several hours.

In 2024 Delta Air Lines struggled for several days to recover from a worldwide technology outage caused by a faulty software update. The outage also hit other airlines, hospitals and businesses around the world.

By Michelle Chapman