FAA Grounds Flights Nationwide After Computer System Failure

The Federal Aviation Administration has grounded all planes in the country following a computer failure. This is the first time that this has happened since September 11.

Wednesday morning, the FAA released a statement saying, “There was an outage at the FAA that would impact the updating of NOTAMS. ”

FAA NOTAMS refers to “a notice that contains essential information for personnel involved in flight operations but is not sufficiently advanced to be made public through other means.” It is a description of the abnormal status of a National Airspace System, (NAS), rather than its normal status.

At 7:19 AM, the FAA tweeted that they had ordered airlines to suspend domestic flights until 9 AM Eastern Time in order to “validate the integrity of flight information.”

The agency kept people updated via Twitter throughout the morning.

The FAA posted via Twitter that the ground stop was lifted at 8:50 am. Normal air traffic operations across the U.S. have resumed slowly after an overnight disruption to the Notice to Air Missions (which provides safety information to flight crews),

White House spokeswoman Katherine Jean-Pierre tweeted that Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg had informed the president about the situation. Jean-Pierre said, “There is no evidence of hacker attacks at this time. ”

Mayor Pete announced just before 9:15 AM that the system had been fully restored. He also said that he would initiate an after-action procedure, which corporate-speak refers to “we’ll make great shows of trying to solve this problem.”

The FAA system failure comes on the heels of widespread flight cancelations by Southwest and other airlines over the holidays that stranded thousands of passengers.