The Federal Aviation Administration says no American Airlines flights took off nationwide for about 40 minutes Sunday because of an outage at the carrier’s main operating system and dispatch operation.

Fort Worth-based American says in a statement the airline “experienced a brief connectivity issue” with one of its data centers and that all operations were returning to normal.

The FAA says in a tweet it worked with American to impose the ground stop after the failure about 2:05 p.m. EDT Sunday. The agency says the system was restored about 2:45 p.m. and flights were allowed to resume.

In the brief statement, American spokeswoman Luren Ruotolo says the airline apologizes to its customers “for the inconvenience.”

(AP)