Another Day, Another Disaster at America’s Airports

The FAA has already grounded all domestic outbound flights as of today’s writing until at least 9 a.m. ET. It might take longer for the FAA to restore service on its NOTAM system. This is an online platform that all commercial or military pilots must use before taking off.

The disruption started hours earlier and the FAA appears to have struggled with it. Savannah Guthrie describes it as “a disruption”. “sweeping outage,” The FAA will likely have to cancel flights for several hours after it is restored.

NEW: A major computer outage at the FAA has caused flight delays across the country.

A source who knew the situation said that all U.S. flights were grounded following the incident. @NBCNews.@tomcostellonbc Share the details. https://t.co/z4vajYuIAj pic.twitter.com/0cLdOlG5Mv

— TODAY (@TODAYshow) January 11, 2023

What exactly was the date of this outage? According to the FAA Washington PostIt began yesterday afternoon Eastern Time

According to the FAA, the outage occurred on Tuesday night at 8:28 PM UTC. The cause of the problem was not immediately known. After the system failed, “no new NOTAMs or amendments have been processed,” The FAA stated. NOTAM stands for Notable Arrangements of Management. “Notice to Air Missions.”

Universal time, also known as Greenwich Mean Time in the past, is five hours ahead Eastern Time. That means the system went down approximately at 3:30 ET yesterday afternoon, and it’s still not up. That in itself raises some interesting questions, to which we’ll return shortly.

The New York Times reported Just a moment ago, the system was “beginning to come back,” But even though it happens quickly, the cascade effect will continue to reverberate at minimum for 24 hours.

• F.A.A. The F.A.A. ordered all domestic flights to be halted until 9 a.m. Eastern Time. “to allow the agency to validate the integrity of flight and safety information,” It said so in a statement. According to FlightAware (a flight tracking service), more than 2,500 flights into, out, and within the United States were delayed Wednesday.

• Multiple airlines were affected by the delays, which spread throughout the country. United Airlines stated in a statement that all domestic flights were temporarily delayed and would update the F.A.A. when more information becomes available. American Airlines confirmed the situation “impacts all airlines” It was. “working with the F.A.A. to minimize disruption to our operation and customers.”

NBC’s Tom Costello reminded Today Last week’s disruption was only visible to Florida air traffic. The disruption took several hours to fix and, thanks to the highly-connected commercial air travel system of Florida, also had a significant impact on travel in other areas.

There are a few questions that this raises, such as whether this is a regular computer problem or something entirely different. Is Florida the first victim of a cyberattack? The White House says they have no evidence that this is an intentional attack on the FAA’s systems, but Neither does anyone. What is the real cause of the outage?

“They don’t know what the cause is,” After speaking with Pete Buttigieg (Transportation Secretary), President Biden spoke to reporters about the F.A.A. outage. “Aircraft can still land safely, just not take off right now. 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.”

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg spent last Wednesday blaming Southwest Airlines for its system failures that left thousands of travelers stranded. At least, he seems to have no answers as of the last few hours.

I spoke to FAA about the outage that affected a critical system that provides safety information to pilots. FAA is working quickly and safely to resolve the issue so that air traffic can resume normal operation. We will keep you updated.

— Secretary Pete Buttigieg (@SecretaryPete) January 11, 2023

Even if this is not a cyberattack — or maybe Particularly if it’s not a cyberattack — Buttigieg will have some explaining to do. The following questions will be asked:

• Is this the same type of failure that affected Florida last week?
• What has Transportation done in order to modernize its systems and teach Southwest about their maintenance and modernization?
• Why is it taking so much time to restore normal operation?
• Is Buttigieg addressing any remaining issues in this mission-critical NOTAM program?
• Why did it take so many days for people to learn of the failure

We may soon have some answers. We’ll update this post as necessary if they do. Meantime, if you’re flying today, better have your contingency plans at the ready. It’s going to be a It’s a long time! day.

Up-to-date: Just as a reminder, it’s not like Buttigieg can plead poverty:

more than doubled again…
$15 Billion was spent on FAA infrastructure.
$5 Billion for Air Traffic Facilities https://t.co/WZvYPSoOrA pic.twitter.com/Tc1vjkEG1t

— Frog Capital (@FrogNews) January 11, 2023

Up-to-date: The FAA lifted the national ground stop a few minutes ago, but it’s not clear whether the NOTAM system has been fully restored or they’re using work-arounds. Two airports were reopened without NOTAM. “air congestion” Before you end the ground stop

Update 5: Normal air traffic operations across the U.S. are gradually resuming after an overnight outage to Notice to Air Missions, which provides safety information to flight crews. The ground stop has been lifted.

We continue to examine the source of the original problem

— The FAA ✈️ (@FAANews) January 11, 2023

Over 500 flights were cancelled and more than three thousand were delayed this morning. Air travel is in chaos right now. Keep checking back.

Update: It doesn’t appear that NOTAM is functioning yet, at least not fully

This error occurs when you attempt to log in. pic.twitter.com/75NwrW11CW

— Michele Blood (@BloodBrief) January 11, 2023

Foreflight informs you that FAA NOTAMS ARE OFFICIALLY OUTAGED. THIS MESSAGE WILL BE MODIFIED IF MORE INFORMATION IS AVAILABLE.

Effective January 11, 2023, 7 :22 AM MST

— Gwen Linde (@GwenLinde) January 11, 2023