In the United States, the Airline Industry has resumed services after a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) system outage caused thousands of flight delays and cancellations.
On Wednesday, the FAA briefly stopped all domestic flight departures across the US as the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system that provides pilots with pre-flight safety notices went off. The system sends alerts to pilots to make them aware of conditions that could affect the safety of their flights. The system was restored later.
Following the outage, major US carriers such as United Airlines, Delta, and American Airlines grounded flights. United and Delta have issued travel waivers while American Airlines let customers rebook their flights without additional fees.
According to FlightAware, which tracks delays and cancellations, more than 9,500 flights to, from, and within the United States got delayed and more than 1,300 flights were cancelled. More than 400 flights got cancelled in Southwest.
Internationally, flights were not cancelled but faced delays.
The FAA said that the outage was caused by a corrupted file, ruling out any indication of a cyber attack. Meanwhile, Nav Canada also reported an outage of Canada’s NOTAM system on the same day. However, the outage that lasted for about three hours did not impact flight operations. It is still under investigation.
