It was just another evening in the control towers and server rooms of United Airlines, until one “technology issue” echoed across the nation’s skies, grounding hundreds of mainline flights and leaving passengers stranded at gates and on tarmacs.

The misinformation stemmed from a technical outage, which briefly halted United's mainline flights across the US. The airline has since clarified that operations are back to normal, but residual delays and mixed messages continue to perplex fliers.