FAA System Outage Prevents All Flights Across The US From Taking Off

Thousands of eager passengers were left stranded at airports across the United States after a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) pilot-alert system broke down overnight, leaving all departing flights in the country grounded.

Flight-tracking application FlightAware noted that over 9,500 trips within the nation faced delays, which worsened throughout the day as more departures got pushed back, and more than 1,300 flights were canceled altogether. 

Thankfully, early the next day, the FAA managed to restore the important program—one that sends pilots messages and information about closed runways, potential hazards in the air, and other pertinent details.

According to CNBC, the system had failed due to a corrupted file. Initially, the agency thought the matter was resolved, but when it broke down again, it was made to reboot the entire system and ordered all flights to grind to a halt. 

Naturally, many were left wondering why such a key system wouldn’t have adequate backup in case of scenarios just like this one. The publication noted that while the program did have primary and secondary backups, both were affected by bad data, and couldn’t be used. 

As per Sky News, Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that there was no evidence the outage was caused by a cyberattack, though further action will be taken to thoroughly investigate the matter, which will be reported back to President Joe Biden directly. 

Going forward, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has called for an after-action review “to determine root causes and recommend next steps” to ensure such a nationwide outage doesn’t happen again. 

[via CNBC and Sky News, cover image via Péter Gudella | Dreamstime.com]