Hundreds of flights across the U.S. were grounded Wednesday amid a computer outage at the Federal Aviation Administration. After the system that provides pilots with pre-flight safety notices went offline, the FAA ordered all domestic flight departures across the United States to be halted until at least 9 a.m. ET as it worked to restore its Notice to Air Missions System (NOTAMS), quickly leading to more than 2,000 flight delays.
The issues began early Wednesday morning, with the FAA tweeting at 6:29 a.m. that it was “working to restore its Notice to Air Missions System” and was in the process of “performing final validation checks and reloading the system now.” At the time, the FAA said “operations across the National Airspace System are affected.” About 30 minutes later, the FAA indicated that the issues were ongoing, and it was “still working to fully restore” the NOTAMS. The administration noted that “while some functions are beginning to come back on line, National Airspace System operations remain limited,” before announcing a pause on domestic flight departures at 5:19 a.m.
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“The FAA is still working to fully restore the Notice to Air Missions system following an outage,” the agency said. “The FAA has ordered airlines to pause all domestic departures until 9 a.m. Eastern Time to allow the agency to validate the integrity of flight and safety information.”
The agency went on to note that “all flights currently in the sky are safe to land,” a statement reiterated by President Joe Biden, who told reporters Wednesday morning that “aircraft can still land safely, just not take off right now.” Biden, per Axios, added, “they don’t know what the cause of it is, they expect in a couple of hours they’ll have a good sense of what caused it and will respond at that time.”
Amid the outage, FlightAware, which tracks delays and cancellations, showed nearly 2,512 flights to, from and within the United States as being delayed as of 7:45 am ET. That number surged to more than 3,700 delays by 8:30 a.m. ET. Airlines for America, the association representing US airlines, said the outage is “causing significant operational delays,” with United Airlines announcing that it has temporarily delayed all domestic flights, per CNN. In a statement, American Airlines said it is “closely monitoring the situation, which impacts all airlines, and working with the FAA to minimize disruption to our operation and customers.”
Biden, who was briefed on the situation, has since ordered a Department of Transportation (DOT) investigation into the outage. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre confirmed in a tweet that “there is no evidence of a cyberattack at this point, but the President directed DOT to conduct a full investigation into the causes.”
