Airlines were working to put travel chaos behind them on Thursday after a computer glitch forced the Federal Aviation Administration to halt all departures across the country while he rushed to resolve the issue.
As of early Thursday morning, just over 440 flights to, from and from the US were delayed, according to flight-tracking website FlightAware, a paltry number compared to the thousands of flights that were delayed the Wednesday after that the system that sends pilots key information they need to fly suffered the blackout.
A senior government official said the problem was caused by a corrupted file that affected both the main and backup systems of the FAA’s air mission notification system, or NOTAM. Officials are continuing to investigate the issue, they said.
The FAA said in a statement that it was «continuing a comprehensive review to determine the root cause» of the NOTAM system outage. «Our preliminary work has traced the outage to a corrupted database file. At this time, there is no evidence of a cyberattack,» he said.
Both passengers and carriers expected operations to return to normal, but Capt. Chris Torres, vice president of the Allied Pilots Association, warned that the chaotic situation could «cause domino effects.»