The United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced that a computer software malfunction affected the Notice to Air Missions System (NOTAM) earlier today, forcing the civil aviation regulator to suspend all domestic departures nationwide.
The FAA stressed that planes already in the sky were not at risk as a result of the NOTAM outage.
A program glitch in FAA system used to send essential information to aircraft and communicate crucial data to air traffic control, has effectively grounded all domestic flights in the United States.
According to the FAA, the glitch was affecting all flights within the US and its technicians were trying to reboot the system but offered no indication of how long it would take for the system to come back online.
Meanwhile, the regulator had ordered the suspension of domestic departures for ‘several hours,’ as the system was gradually restoring functionality.
According to FlightAware, an American multi-national technology company that provides real-time, historical, and predictive flight tracking data, the FAA system’s outage caused over 2,500 delays and more than 300 cancellations of flights traveling to or from US airports.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that President Biden was briefed by US Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg on the FAA system outage.
There is “no evidence of a cyberattack at this point,” Jean-Pierre added