The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Wednesday, January 12th, said that a corrupted database file resulted in a software glitch used to transmit crucial information to aircraft across the country, prompting the regulator to halt all further domestic departures.
In a statement released Wednesday morning, the FAA said the glitch affected the Notice to Air Mission System (NOTAM), which is used to alert pilots to possible hazards along their flight routes. Some 10,000 flights were grounded nationwide as a result, representing the first time in twenty years that a mishap this severe has taken place in the country, Yahoo News reports.
“We are continuing a thorough review to determine the root cause of the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system outage,” the FFA said in an update given Wednesday, adding: “Our preliminary work has traced the outage to a damaged database file. At this time, there is no evidence of a cyberattack.”
According to a senior White House official, the “damaged database file” affected both the primary and backup systems. The U.S. government has also dismissed speculation that the mass groundings were a result of a cyberattack. There is “no evidence of a cyber attack” in the FAA outage, the White House said in an official statement.
Another senior White House official told ABC News that an engineer, without realizing it, “replaced one file with another,” and added that the mistake, despite being an “honest” one, “cost the country millions.”
Although the glitch began affecting NOTAM systems overnight on Tuesday—and although FAA managed to lift the full ground stop some hours later, at approximately 9 a.m. ECT—the damage had already been done to the flight schedules for the day, forcing a full ground stop of domestic aviation on Wednesday morning.
“The president has directed the Department of Transportation to conduct a full investigation into the causes and provide regular updates. Again, this is incredibly important to top priority [sic] the safety of Americans who are flying. We want to make sure that they’re safe,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said during a press conference on the fiasco.
A similar outage affected Canada’s air traffic system for a short while on Wednesday, reported Nav Canada, the Canadian national air service provider, in a statement at around 12:30 p.m., following announcements from the FAA that U.S. airlines had not yet resumed their standard services.
According to a report from Sky News, which cites the aviation analytics firm Cirium, some 21,464 flights are scheduled to depart from airports across the United States on Thursday, January 12th. Some 2.9 million seats are available on the scheduled flights.
