Airbus A320 Glitch Grounds 6,000 Jets, Airlines Recover Fast

On November 28, 2025, Airbus issued an urgent Alert Operators Transmission, instructing airlines to immediately repair approximately 6,000 A320-family aircraft, including the A318, A319, A320, and A321. These are Airbus’s most widely used single-aisle jets, so the alert triggered a massive global response.

The problem involved a software flaw that, when exposed to unusually strong solar radiation, could corrupt flight control data and possibly lead to unexpected aircraft movements.

Europe’s aviation regulator, EASA, followed quickly with an emergency airworthiness directive that took effect at midnight on November 29. The FAA issued matching guidance for the US. Both agencies required airlines to keep any affected aircraft on the ground until the aircraft were operating on an earlier, stable version of the software.

That sudden grounding threw airline schedules into chaos through the Thanksgiving weekend. Thousands of flights were delayed or cancelled while operators performed software rollbacks that took between 2 and 4 hours per aircraft.

Some airlines moved fast. Wizz Air completed its fixes overnight, while carriers like easyJet, Vueling, and LATAM shuffled aircraft or borrowed jets to keep their networks running. Major hubs in the US and Europe felt ripple effects as crews and aircraft fell out of position.

By December 1, most airlines had cleared the problem. Approximately 5,100 aircraft were back in service after reverting to the earlier software, and fewer than 100 jets were still awaiting hardware replacements.

The situation was made even worse by a strong storm that struck areas across the US Midwest and the Great Lakes during the Thanksgiving weekend. With millions of people traveling for the holiday, the harsh weather added another layer of delays and operational disruptions.

Photo by Daniel Eledut on Unsplash