All American Airlines flights grounded*

What a mess - the reservations system has been shut down this morning and now comes word that the FAA has grounded all planes until 2 p.m. L.A. time. Many hundreds of flights are being affected. Apparently planes are landing but the gates are occupied by other aircraft unable to take off. KNX reports that the LAX terminal has been in gridlock, a scene no doubt being repeated around the country. No word yet on what caused the outage.

*Update: Computers are back up and planes are getting back in the air. More than 400 flights were canceled due to this morning's glitch and many others delayed. By the way, this had nothing to do with the pending merger with US Air, which hasn't even been approved yet. From the NYT:

American said the issue was caused by an inability to get access to its reservations system, called Sabre. The electronic system, often described as the brains of an airline, is responsible for bookings and reservations but also manages a wide variety of functions related to flights, including printing boarding passes, online check-ins, ticketing, and tracking checked bags. While the cause of the problem was not immediately clear, the airline emphasized that the outage was not related to the attacks in Boston on Monday. Safety officials at airports around the country were on high alert on Tuesday. A suspicious package at LaGuardia Airport in New York, for instance, caused the main terminal to be evacuated briefly, causing an hourlong delay on some flights, officials said.