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00:00Let's go back to the United States now, speak to Fraser Jackson, normally our White House
00:04correspondent on assignment in Milwaukee. He was covering the Republican National Convention,
00:08meant to be heading back to the nation's capital, and then this outage happened.
00:13Fraser, tell us about your experience.
00:18I'll tell you one thing, William. This was not what anybody had foreseen for the end of the
00:24Republican National Convention. Me and my colleagues have been covering the RNC for
00:28the last five days. It's been a lot of late nights and early mornings and a lot of working,
00:33and we were all excited to head back to Washington to get back to our day jobs and, you know,
00:39various political stories that we believe will be developing over the course of the weekend.
00:43It was already looking like it was going to be busy, and then this bug happened and we found
00:47out that the major American airlines have all been grounded. So we're talking Delta,
00:52United, and also American Airlines, which coincidentally is the flight that I should
00:56be taking back in approximately 45 minutes time, but that is not going to be happening.
01:02Instead, we are, as you can see, have big queues of people at the airport trying to get onto their
01:09flights. It is a very early morning already, and there is hundreds and hundreds of people here.
01:16The line actually stretches all the way out of the screen on your left-hand side,
01:21all the way through the doors and back down the concourse outside as well. So it really is
01:25quite a long line. There was some good news, however, about 5 a.m. local time.
01:32There was an update from American Airlines, at least, who said that earlier this morning,
01:37a technical issue with a vendor impacted multiple carriers, including American.
01:42As of 5 a.m. Eastern, we have been able to safely re-establish our operation.
01:46We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience. So flights from American,
01:51now able to take off once again, that FAA grounding then lifted, which means that now
01:57all they have to do is try to work through the backlog of all of the customers whose
02:02flights were already meant to have taken off. Now, of course, that is easier said than done.
02:06And here in Milwaukee, not a massive city when you compare it to places like Washington or New
02:10York or Chicago or Atlanta, but there have been over 55,000 extra people in this town
02:18here for the RNC, including a lot of security personnel, who I'm sure you can see behind me
02:23as well, those police officers heading back to their home states, having been here for a couple
02:29of weeks to help secure the perimeter of the RNC, especially in the wake of that assassination
02:34attempt on Donald Trump. So a very busy morning ahead for the staff here at Milwaukee International
02:39Airport and probably quite a long day ahead for me as well as I try to get back home.
02:44Indeed, Fraser, real quickly before we let you go, how long of a delay are you looking at then?
02:52There's so far, I must say on a personal note, there's not been a lot of information from
02:57American Airlines, so they haven't really officially delayed my flight yet. But when
03:02I look at the amount of people that need to get through and who are now in the line ahead of me,
03:07because I'm here doing this, it's looking like it's going to be a significant delay,
03:12at least a couple of hours, I would say. But considering that when this first hit,
03:18we didn't know how long this would take, I think a couple hours delay is not actually
03:22that bad considering that we didn't know the scope and the scale of this software malfunction.
03:29So it seems to not have been as bad as it could have been, but it has been at least
03:35four or five hours worth of operations that were impacted here in the United States at least.