Aviation authorities were racing Wednesday to figure out what caused the outage of a crucial alert system that forced the temporary halt on all US domestic takeoffs, triggering thousands of delays and cancellations.
The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said normal operations were being restored but the early morning halt created knock-on effects that snarled travel throughout the day.
The grounding order was issued after the FAA identified an issue with the Notice to Air Missions system (NOTAM), which provides information to pilots about hazards, changes to airport facilities and information that can affect flights.
“Our preliminary work has traced the outage to a damaged database file,” the FAA said in a tweet Wednesday evening, adding that “at this time, there is no evidence of a cyberattack.”
The temporary outage spelled yet another hellish day for US travelers — less than a month after a bad winter storm roiled the system
