iNDICA NEWS BUREAU-
In a major US aviation crisis, over 10,000 flights were either delayed or canceled on Wednesday morning due to a computer database glitch at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). It denied that it was a cyber attack.
The agency said in a tweet at around 6:30 pm Eastern, “We are continuing a thorough review to determine the root cause of the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system outage. Our preliminary work has traced the outage to a damaged database file. At this time, there is no evidence of a cyber attack. We are working diligently to further pinpoint the causes of this issue and take all needed steps to prevent this kind of disruption from happening again.”
The FAA instituted a nationwide pause on departures, known as a ground stop, for about 90 minutes on Wednesday morning, but that order had been lifted by 9 am EST.
But the damage was already done. By 5 pm Eastern, more than 9,000 flights within, into, or out of the US were delayed according to the flight-tracking website FlightAware, and more than 1,300 flights in the country were canceled.
The FAA, which is the US aviation regulator like India’s Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), said that at around 9 a.m. (7:30 p.m. IST), operations were being restored with departures resuming at many US airports, adding that the pause it had ordered was being lifted.
The matter was serious enough for President Joe Biden to comment. Biden told reporters that he had asked the department of transport, which oversees aviation, to “report directly to me when they find out” the cause. “They don’t know what the cause is, they expect in a couple of hours they’ll have a good sense of what caused it and will respond at that time,” he said.
The FAA ordered a pause on departures at around 7 am Eastern. Flights already airborne and those coming in to land were exempted.
Industry experts said while operations were being restored, it will be several hours before they return to normalcy.
“Normal air traffic operations are resuming gradually across the US following an overnight outage to the Notice to Air Missions system that provides safety info to flight crews. The ground stop has been lifted,” FAA said in an update on Twitter, adding, “We continue to look into the cause of the initial problem.”
These disruptions did not carry over into the defence sector, which operates its own system.
Lt. Col. Devin T. Robinson, a Pentagon spokesman, told the Washington Post that the defence department uses a different system than the one used by the FAA.
