Originally Posted by
findark
Pulling from EF, but I'm not sure a distributed systems explanation really accounts for how it was ever blocked out at 11:11a. Notably, for each of the datapoints, the Flight Status on ua.com showed the same info.
The "ever blocked out at 11:11" could be explained by a return to gate that wasn't coded as such, but if UA was showing the same data my hypothesis about stale data is shot.
I'm not sure to what extent UA permits this (and who has the abilities to do it) but it could have been a manual update (why?) that then got replaced when the ACARS "OUT" message actually got sent.