United Airlines grounds all flights across US

The US Federal Aviation Administration says all United Airlines flights have been grounded because of “automation issues.”

Flights were grounded at all airports and all facilities across the United States on Wednesday morning for more than one hour.

“We are recovering from a network connectivity issue this morning and restoring regular flight operations,” United said in a statement.

“We will have a waiver available at united.com for customers who are able to change their flight plans,” it added.

There are "no signs of malicious activity at this time," a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security told AFP. "We're still investigating."

The airline said flights were prevented from taking off because "an issue with a router degraded network connectivity for various applications.”

"We fixed the router issue, which is enabling us to restore normal functions," United said.

In six weeks, it was the second time that United Airlines flights were grounded across the US. The airline said this happened because of a computer glitch.

United Airlines says it serves 235 domestic airports and has 4,935 daily flights.

The incident came shortly before trading was stopped on the New York Stock Exchange as a result of purported technical problems.

The unusual halt in trading at one of the world’s largest exchanges could have been caused by a cyber attack, some people say.

However, an unnamed US official told the Washington Post that there was “no indication” that a cyber attack caused the problems.

The official claimed that the incident “seems like a technical issue.”

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