Airline flights were halted across the United States last Wednesday after the Federal Aviation Administration suffered a computer outage.
According to the FAA, the crippling delays that affected thousands of flights appears to have been caused by a problem in the Notice to Air Missions system (NOTAM) which sends vital information to pilot they need to fly.
The first sign that it was likely to be a massive incident came around 7:20 a.m., when the FAA sent out a tweet ordering the airlines to pause all domestic departures until 9 a.m. ET “to allow the agency to validate the integrity of flight and safety information” as it worked to restore the NOTAM system.
A government official stated that a corrupted file affected both the primary and the backup systems.
“The FAA is continuing a thorough review to determine the root cause of the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system outage,” the agency said in a statement. “Our preliminary work has traced the outage to a damaged database file. At this time, there is no evidence of a cyber attack.”
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said that the FAA will further pinpoint the source and identify steps to prevent it from happening again.
“One of the questions we need to look at right now, and one of the things I’m asking from FAA, is what’s the state of the art in this form of message traffic?” said Buttigieg. “And again, how is it possible for there to be this level of disruption?”
Sen. Maria Cantwell, DWash., who heads the Commerce Committee, which oversees the FAA, said it, too, will look into the matter.
“The No. 1 priority is safety,” Cantwell said in a statement. “As the Committee prepares for FAA reauthorization legislation, we will be looking into what caused this outage and how redundancy plays a role in preventing future outages. The public needs a resilient air transportation system.”
Sen. Ted Cruz, the top Republican on the committee, said the “FAA’s inability to keep an important safety system up and running is completely unacceptable and just the latest example of dysfunction within the Department of Transportation.”
The delays came just weeks after Southwest Airlines caused travel chaos by canceling more than 2,500 of its flights during the Christmas season.
The FAA lifted the ground stop around 8:50 a.m., and normal air traffic operations began resuming gradually. But by then airports across the country were already crowded with frustrated travelers and a backlog of flights.
As of noon, more than 7,300 flights within, to and out of the U.S. had been delayed, according to the online flight tracker Flight-Aware. More than 1,100 flights were listed as canceled.