January 13, 2023
Preliminary investigations by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) posit the anomaly that led to the delay of more than 11,000 flights, and cancellation of at least 1,300 flights was a “damaged database file.”
“Our preliminary work has traced the outage to a damaged database file. At this time, there is no evidence of a cyberattack,” the FAA said.
The FAA decided to shut down and reboot the main NOTAM system overnight Tuesday into Wednesday, a significant decision given that the reboot can take up to 90 minutes, according to the source. To minimize flight disruption, they decided to perform the reboot early Wednesday, before air traffic began flying on the East Coast.
An unnamed source familiar with FAA operations told CNN that officials discovered a corrupted file on the NOTAM (Notice to Air Missions) system Tuesday afternoon, with another on the backup system.
Meanwhile, the FAA said in a statement that it was continuing to investigate the outage and would “take all necessary steps to prevent this type of disruption from occurring again.”
Although the technical issues have been resolved, the outage has caused catastrophic delays across the country, with over 8,000 flights delayed and 1,000 canceled, with more disappointment on the way as airlines and airports scramble to catch up.
The sources for this piece include an article in CNN.
