FAA glitch grounds all US flights

Cyberattack not to blame, says President

A glitch in the Federal Aviation Administration's computer systems has grounded all flights into, out of and across the USA.

The issue is in the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system, which alerts pilots of potential hazards along a flight route. As of 15:50 GMT more than 13,400 flights have been grounded, and 2,386 cancelled entirely.

Although flights have been returning as of 14:00 GMT, the outage is thought to have lasted as much as nine hours. The FAA is investigating the cause, but a cyberattack is not thought to be behind the outage.

Sky News correspondent Mark Stone said this was an "almighty mess" for US aviation.

"As of this morning we were told that the NOTAM system had failed, which is part of the air traffic control system. This is critical for flights to be able to take off safely. So as a consequence the busiest airspace in the world, the airspace over the United States, didn't open as it should have done this morning.

"Looking at the flight tracker websites it was very clear you could see flights clustered around many cities around the United States and none of them taking off. Chaos for passengers, as you might imagine."

No evidence of cyberattack

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said President Biden had been briefed on the issue and that there was no evidence of a cyberattack against the FAA. However, "the President directed [the US Department of Transport] to conduct a full investigation into the causes."

Social media is full of complaints and stories from people affected. One person, whose plane was forced to turn around in mid-air and return to their departure airport, said, 'Waiting on tarmac, though people are being let off the flight if they want to cancel the trip, but everyone else is stuck "indefinitely". There are about 20 planes I can see parked as well, so it's going to be an absolute nightmare to get things back on track.'

Millions of people have been affected by the outage, as well as hundreds of cargo flights.