FAA Computer Outage Grounds Flights in U.S.

Early Wednesday morning, a computer outage led to all domestic flights being grounded.

The Timetable
At 8:12am ET there were 3,578 flight delays within, in and out of United States. There were 450 flight cancellations.

At 8:15am ET, flights were allowed to land at Atlanta International Airport and Newark Liberty International Airport. This allowance was put into place by the FAA.

By 9am ET it was expected for flights to resume departures from these points.

At 9am ET, there were 4,013 delays within, into, or out of the United States. There are 2,062 flight cancellations.

At 9:15am ET, there were 4,314 delays within, into, or out of the United States. There are 2,122 flight cancellations.

However, the FAA has ordered all flights to HALT departures amid growing problems with the system outage.

Stay updated on these numbers by visiting Flight Aware.

The Outage

According to Fox News:
The outage comes as a result of the failure of the FAA’s NOTAM (Notice to Air Missions) system, which alerts pilots and other personnel about airborne issues and other delays at airports across the country.
“The NOTAM outage continued with no current estimated time of restoration,” the FAA website stated Wednesday morning.
“The FAA is working to restore its Notice to Air Missions System. We are performing final validation checks and repopulating the system now,” the FAA said

“While some functions are beginning to come back online, National Airspace System operations remain limited,” the statement continued. Most airlines had already chosen to ground their own craft due to the system’s failure early Wednesday. The failure has so far resulted in some 400 canceled flights across the U.S., according to FlightAware. The tracker also showed that more than 1,150 flights within, into or out of the U.S. were delayed. United Airlines announced its decision to ground all of its aircraft until 10 a.m. ET due to the outage.

The Secretary
The Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigeg weighed in on Twitter.

The FAA
For up to date information on this developing story, follow the FAA on Twitter.

The President

According to Axios:

President Biden told reporters on Wednesday morning that he had spoken with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg about the outage and asked that he “report directly to me when they find out” the cause. “Aircraft can still land safely, just not take off right now. They don’t know what the cause of it is, they expect in a couple of hours they’ll have a good sense of what caused it and will respond at that time,” Biden said. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre tweeted Wednesday that there was “no evidence of a cyberattack at this point.” The ground stop would allow the FAA “to validate the integrity of flight and safety information,” it said.