United’s computer systems had difficulty sending flight plans out to planes this morning. There was no ground stop issued, just significant delays across their system. The technology problem appeared to be resolved by early afternoon, but once flights are delayed that cascades across the system for at least the remainder of the day.

This comes just two and a half weeks after United suffered an IT meltdown that did require a ground stop.

Now it seems though United planes are flying they cannot sell you a ticket.

United.com simply returns this error when you try to search for an itinerary:

Or when you try to search for an award booking:

IT is hard. And these legacy systems are complex, they don’t know where the next problem will creep up from. But these failures don’t just inconvenience customers they even prevent customers from buying tickets it’s a real problem.

At this point, United, when you’re spending IT resources to implement ‘Basic Economy’ fares that don’t allow customers to have a carry on, or to eliminate the ability to book a stopover on an award ticket, you’re doing it wrong.

Update: I can get flight searches to work using Internet Explorer, but not Google Chrome.