All US flights grounded after computer glitch

New York, March 16, 2017: An American Airlines jet late in the day at gate 14 Terminal 8 at JFK.

Over 1,200 flights were cancelled and 8,000 were delayed across the United States on Wednesday morning after a computer glitch meant no domestic flights could take off.

During a period of two hours no planes could take off from any airport across the US yesterday.

The glitch was a failure of a national safety system and took place between 7am and 9am New York time (11pm Wednesday to 1am Thursday AEDT). It saw hundreds of thousands of passengers stranded at airports.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system had gone down. NOTMAS gives pilots information regarding safety before take-off and during the flight.

The FAA tweeted that it was working to restore NOTAM system at 7am New York time and that airline operations would be affected.

The FAA is working to restore its Notice to Air Missions System. We are performing final validation checks and reloading the system now.
Operations across the National Airspace System are affected.
We will provide frequent updates as we make progress.
— The FAA ✈️ (@FAANews) January 11, 2023

By 7:30am the FAA ordered all domestic flights to “pause” while it sorted out the issue. Radar and air traffic control remained online and there was “no evidence” of a cyberattack, according to the White House.

Some international flights were also affected with passengers in Paris, London and Madrid saying their flights to the US were cancelled.

In Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. Airline just informed us that the FAA computers are down in the US and no flights are flying to America.
— Sal Paradise (@kjbulko) January 11, 2023

Gotta love when you book a 6 am flight trying to avoid travel delays, but due to a nationwide FAA system issue the flight is delayed anyway. Going to be a long day 🙂
— Adele Burk (@BurkAdele) January 11, 2023

On the outage, US President Joe Biden said he wanted a report.

“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,” Biden said.

Biden said that there was an investigation ongoing and the likelihood of a cyberattack was not out of the question.

Pete Buttigieg, the US transport secretary, said he was in touch with the FAA on the issue of safety.

“The FAA is working to resolve this issue swiftly and safely so that air traffic can resume normal operations, and will continue to provide updates,” Buttigieg said.

The FAA handle around 45,000 flights per day with 5,400 in the sky at any one time. Approximately three million passengers a day hop on a flight in the US.

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