Wednesday, January 11, 2023 | 11:45 a.m.
The United States suspended all flights in the country on Wednesday due to a computer failure, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) reported.
“The FAA is still working to fully restore the Notice to Air Missions system following an outage,” the agency said on its website, adding that “airlines were ordered to suspend all domestic departures until 9 p.m. Eastern ( 11 in Argentina), to allow the agency to validate the integrity of the flight information and security.
In a later message, they indicated that departures from the Newark airports, in New York, and Hartsfield-Jackson, in Atlanta, were resumed due to “congestion problems in those areas.”
The US network NBC News indicated that the failure in the FAA’s computer system caused widespread problems in the US and abroad. According to NBC News sources, the glitch affected “all flights.”
As of 7:30 a.m., more than 1,200 flights to or from the United States were delayed, according to flight-tracking website FlightAware, which said more than 100 were cancelled.
While most of the delays were concentrated on the East Coast, soon the delays spread to the other end of the country. The Air Traffic Control System Command Center warned passengers to prepare for long delays.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a tweet that he is in contact with the FAA to address the “outage that affected a key system for providing safety information to pilots.”
No evidence “for the moment” that the failure is due to a cyber attack
“At the moment” there is no evidence that the computer problem that caused the suspension of domestic flights in the United States is due to a cyber attack, the White House said.
“There is no evidence of a cyberattack at this time, but President Joe Biden has directed DOT to conduct a full investigation into what caused it. The FAA will provide regular updates,” tweeted press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, referring to the Department of Transportation and the Federal Aviation Authority.
