11th January, 2023
A computer outage at the Federal Aviation Administration brought flights to a standstill across the United States on Wednesday.
Hundreds of flight delays quickly cascaded through the system at airports in the country.
“Operations across the National Airspace System are affected,’’ the FAA wrote on Twitter.
It added that the system was being reloaded.
“While some functions are beginning to come back online, National Airspace System operations remain limited,’’ it said.
According to the website flightaware.com, by the morning more than 1,250 flights within, to or from the U.S. were delayed and over 100 were cancelled.
The FAA ordered all U.S. flights to delay departures until 9 a.m. Eastern, though airlines said they were aware of the situation and had already begun grounding flights.
Most delays were concentrated along the East Coast, but were beginning to spread west.
Inbound international flights into Miami International Airport continued to land, but all departures have been delayed since 6:30 a.m., said airport spokesman Greg Chin.
The FAA said it was working on restoring its Notice to Air Missions System.
“We are performing final validation checks and reloading the system now,” the FAA said. “Operations across the National Airspace System are affected.”
The agency said that some functions are beginning to come back on line, but that “National Airspace System operations remain limited.”
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a tweet that he is in touch with the FAA and monitoring the situation.
United Airlines said that it had temporarily delayed all domestic flights and would issue an update once it learned more from the FAA.
The FAA is working to restore what is known as the Notice to Air Missions System.
European flights into the U.S. appeared to be largely unaffected.
Irish carrier Aer Lingus said services to the U.S. continue, and Dublin Airport’s website showed that its flights to Newark, Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles were running on schedule.
“Aer Lingus plan to operate all transatlantic flights as scheduled today,” the carrier said in a prepared statement. “We will continue to monitor but we do not anticipate any disruption to our services arising from the technical issue in the United States.”
The FAA said that it would provide frequent updates as it made progress.