NEWARK, NJ — On Wednesday evening, United Airlines gave the phrase “system reboot” an entirely new meaning. A decades-old computer glitch brought the airline to a halt nationwide, leaving passengers stranded, flights grounded, and social media flooded with jokes about floppy disks and Clippy. The incident, now dubbed “Windows 95 in the Sky,” exposed just how fragile airline technology can be when it’s still running on the same software your dad used to print science fair posters.
When the Sky Blue Screened
At 6:15 p.m. ET on August 6, 2025, United Airlines experienced a system failure that would make Bill Gates wince. The airline’s Unimatic system, its aging operational backbone, threw a full Blue Screen of Death. Within minutes, the FAA issued ground stops at every major United hub.
Gate agents told passengers flights would leave “once Gary from IT finds the floppy labeled ‘Takeoff.exe.’” Travelers began calculating how many restarts it would take to get from Newark to Denver. Most agreed on three, but only if Gary skipped the disk defragmenter.
One traveler claims they actually saw the error message: “Your flight has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down.” Another swore they heard the Windows 95 startup sound faintly echo through Terminal C, immediately followed by the captain announcing they’d “be back online in 15–45 business minutes.”
Meet Unimatic: United’s $10 Billion Beige Box
Despite the fancy industry jargon, United’s Unimatic is essentially a vintage beige desktop running on hope and coffee. Staff say it still plays the Windows 95 startup jingle before asking captains to “Insert Disk 2” for seat maps.
Technicians know the recovery ritual by heart: hold the power button for four seconds, wait ten Mississippi, then try again. One mechanic described it as “state-of-the-art,” while clutching a PS/2 keyboard adapter like it was sacred.
Rumor has it the system still uses a screensaver with bouncing United logos to prevent burn-in. Every time someone tries to modernize it, an error pops up reading “This program requires Internet Explorer 4.0 or earlier.”
The Day the Hubs Stood Still
Once the glitch hit, the FAA grounded United’s mainline fleet at Newark, Chicago O’Hare, Denver, Houston, and San Francisco. These bustling hubs instantly transformed into silent waiting rooms, interrupted only by the occasional boarding call for flights on other airlines.
Chicago O’Hare’s departure board displayed “Please Wait” in massive font for hours. At Denver, some swore they saw a spinning hourglass cursor hovering over Concourse B. In Houston, one ramp worker reported “loading bar anxiety” after watching his gate’s progress inch up by a single percent in an hour.
Passengers in San Francisco reported a pop-up on the gate monitor asking if they wanted to “send an error report.” When someone clicked yes, the screen froze for another 45 minutes.
Passengers Enter the Loading Zone
Over 1,000 flights were delayed and up to 6% canceled. MileagePlus elites wandered the terminals like IT staff on a coffee break, muttering about “service agreements” while gripping their elite status tags. The only thing moving at speed was the lounge pretzel supply, which became unofficial airport currency by nightfall.
United labeled the outage a “controllable delay”. Stranded travelers got hotel rooms, vouchers, and waivers for travel between August 7–10. Some scored $200 vouchers, enough for two-thirds of an economy seat to Des Moines in November. Others bartered pretzels for upgrades in what’s now known as the “Mileage Pretzel Exchange.”
By midnight, small “pretzel cart economies” emerged in multiple terminals. In one case, a family traded two cinnamon pretzels for a single Priority Boarding spot.
United Tech Support: Have You Tried Turning the Sky Off and On Again?
In United’s operations center, the reboot procedure played out like an unfunny sitcom. One intern blew dust out of a PS/2 port while another hunted for the “critical” mouse ball lost during the Obama era.
Managers phoned the FAA to request a “temporary hold on the sky” while systems restarted. Leaked notes reveal their checklist: reboot the beige box, offer Clippy a snack cart, and install all 174 pending updates.
At one point, an IT staffer reportedly whispered, “If this doesn’t work, we’ll have to boot from the emergency AOL CD.” Everyone went silent until the system finally hummed back to life.
No, It Wasn’t a Cyberattack… It Was Worse
These days, most assume any outage comes from hackers in hoodies. Not this time. Both United and the FAA confirmed it wasn’t a cyberattack, it was the slow collapse of old infrastructure.
One insider blamed an “update to Minesweeper” that overwrote the flight schedule. Another claimed a game of Solitaire left open since 2004 had drained the system’s last bit of memory.
Security experts say this is the tech equivalent of locking yourself out of your car because you left the keys in the ignition, while the car is still running, and then blaming “complex software challenges.”
Patch Notes for the Next Update
After the meltdown, United promised “internal improvements” in its next system update. Highlights include: “Added support for color printing in seat maps,” “Now compatible with 21st-century time zones,” and “12% less likely to strand 200,000 passengers.”
Another change will let MileagePlus members check balances without crashing the fleet. Whether these updates roll out before 2095 is anyone’s guess.
In the meantime, staff have reportedly been instructed to keep at least one floppy disk in their pockets at all times, “just in case the cloud goes down again.”
Taxi back to The Takeoff Nap for more satire, snacks, and software-induced aviation chaos.
- For a humorous take on the FAA’s tech woes, check out FAA to modernize IT equipment, upgrade to Windows XP following massive outage.
- If you’re curious about airline IT mishaps, read Nationwide Alaska Airline Reboot Enters Hour 3 as IT Intern Searches for Big Red Button.
- See the latest loyalty program chaos in MileagePlus Downgrade: United Airlines’ New MileageMinus Program Explained.
- Learn about the JetBlue–United collaboration in The Truth About JetBlue And United’s Blue Sky Deal.
- Discover extreme loyalty tactics in Airlines Now Require Blood Oaths for Elite Status.