Flights across the US have been grounded because of a system outage at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
Flights were grounded in the North American country after the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system, which provides pilots with real-time information about changes and potential hazards on flight routes suffered a failure.
The FAA said in a statement;
“The FAA is working to restore its Notice to Air Missions System. We are performing final validation checks and reloading the system now. Operations across the National Airspace System are affected.
“The FAA is still working to fully restore the Notice to Air Missions system following an outage. The FAA has ordered airlines to pause all domestic departures until 9 a.m. Eastern Time to allow the agency to validate the integrity of flight and safety information.”
The exact nature of the computer issue is yet to be disclosed, but the White House has said there’s currently no evidence it’s due to a cyber attack.
FlightAware, which tracks delays and cancellations, showed more than 4,000 flights to, from and within the United States as being delayed as of 8:50 a.m. ET, and 696 flights canceled so far.