FAA system outage grounds all U.S. flights overnight
Travelers look at a flight information board at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport on Jan. 11, 2023. Flights are resuming after an overnight outage of a key FAA system. Alex Wong/Getty Images
An outage to a system providing real-time flight hazard information led to a nationwide ground stop of U.S. air travel Wednesday morning.
The failure of a system that provides essential information about flight operations led to a nationwide ground stop of all U.S. flights Wednesday morning.
It’s unclear what caused the outage to the Notice to Air Missions, or NOTAMs system, which the Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement first occurred Tuesday night.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre tweeted Wednesday morning that there was no evidence of a cyberattack and President Joe Biden had been briefed on the incident.
While agency officials worked to determine the cause of the outage, the FAA grounded all domestic air travel from 7:15 a.m. until 9 a.m. Wednesday.
By 8:50 a.m., the agency had tweeted that the ground stop had been lifted and that “normal air traffic operations are resuming gradually across the U.S.”
The NOTAMs system provides real-time flight operations information about possible risks such as alerting “pilots about closed runways, equipment outages and other potential hazards along a flight route or at a location that could affect the flight,” the FAA said.
The FAA categorizes multiple types of NOTAMs in the U.S., including domestic, civil, military, Flight Data Center, distance dissemination, international and others. It’s not entirely clear what flight information was impacted by the outage.
The agency has been helping oversee an update to the U.S. formatting of NOTAM data to better align with international standards. That transition to standards established by the International Civil Aviation Organization began in 2018 and remains ongoing with a target completion by 2024.