Over 1,200 flights were cancelled and 8,000 were delayed across the us on Wednesday morning after a computer glitch meant no domestic flights could take off from any airport across the US during a period of two hours which saw hundreds of thousands of passengers stranded at airports.
The glitch was a failure of a national safety system and took place between 7am and 9am New York time (11pm Wednesday to 1am Thursday AEDT).
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system had gone down. NOTAMS gives pilots information regarding safety before take-off and during the flight.
The FAA tweeted that it was working to restore NOTAM system at 7am New York time and that airline operations would be affected.
By 7:30am the FAA ordered all domestic flights to “pause” while it sorted out the issue. Radar and air traffic control remained online and there was “no evidence” of a cyberattack, according to the White House.
Some international flights were also affected with passengers in Paris, London and Madrid saying their flights to the US were cancelled.
On the outage, US President Joe Biden said he wanted a report.
“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,” Biden said.
Biden said that there was an investigation ongoing and the likelihood of a cyberattack was not out of the question.
Pete Buttigieg, the US transport secretary, said he was in touch with the FAA on the issue of safety.
The FAA handle around 45,000 flights per day with 5,400 in the sky at any one time. Approximately three million passengers a day hop on a flight in the US.
