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The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) lifted its grounding of flights across the U.S. after computer outages caused thousands of delays at airports across the country.
Earlier in the morning, the FAA ordered all US flights to delay departures until at least 9am ET (2pm GMT).
However, delays and cancellations continued to snowball.
UPDATE 5: Normal air traffic operations are gradually resuming across the United States following an overnight outage of the air mission notification system that provides safety information to crews. The ground station has been lifted.
We continue to investigate the cause of the original issue
— FAA ✈️ (@FAANews) January 11, 2023
The FAA approved flights from Newark Liberty and Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson due to severe congestion.
Normal air traffic operations across the United States are gradually resuming after disruptions, the agency said.
Earlier in the day, more than 3,700 flights were delayed and more than 640 were cancelled.
The FAA said it was investigating the cause of the initial problem.
The FAA has determined that the safety systems affected by the overnight outage are fully restored and the nationwide ground outage will be lifted immediately. I have directed a postmortem process to determine the root cause and recommend next steps.
— Secretary of State Pete Buttigieg (@SecretaryPete) January 11, 2023
According to aviation data firm Cirium, more than 21,000 flights, mostly domestic, are scheduled to depart from the U.S. on Wednesday, with about 1,840 international flights expected to head to the U.S.
Some medical flights can be licensed and the disruption will not affect any military operations or mobility.
While the White House initially said there was no evidence of a cyberattack, U.S. President Joe Biden said “we don’t know” what caused the problem and told reporters he had directed the Department of Transportation to investigate the issue.
Mr. Biden said he had just been briefed by U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who told him they still hadn’t determined what went wrong.
“I just spoke to Buttigieg. They didn’t know what the cause was. But I was on the phone with him for about 10 minutes,” Mr. Biden said.
Mr Buttigieg said in a tweet that he was in touch with the FAA and monitoring the situation.
The FAA said it was working to restore its Notification of Air Tasks (NOTAM) system.
Some functions are starting to resume, but “operations of the National Airspace System remain limited,” the agency said.
The system used to be phone-based, with pilots calling a dedicated flight service station for information, but has now moved online.
Failures of the NOTAM system appear to be rare.
Flights from Europe to the US appear to be largely unaffected.
Irish airline Aer Lingus said it continued to offer services to the US, and Dublin Airport’s website showed its flights to Newark, Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles were running as planned.
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