An outage of the FAA Notice to Air Missions (computer) system (NOTAM) has resulted in all flights being grounded until 9:00 a.m. ET.
Major delays and cancellations are expected this morning and spilling over to the rest of the day and perhaps into tomorrow.
The NOTAM system went down around 3:28 a.m. ET.
What is a NOTAM (Notice to Air Mission)?
A NOTAM is a notice containing information essential to personnel concerned with flight operations but not known far enough in advance to be publicized by other means. It states the abnormal status of a component of the National Airspace System (NAS) – not the normal status.
These are alarms and notices sent out to pilots and other personnel of the aviation sector, that might affect their safety. Without it, the system cannot be operated.
Note that this is not a failure of the air traffic control/routing system itself.
Root Cause
Cause: Unknown, but surely it will be investigated. No evidence of a cyberattack at this point in time.
Current Status
Over 5,000 flights delayed or canceled so far in the U.S. flightaware.com/...
Total delays today: 11,392
Total delays within, into, or out of the United States today: 4,592
Total cancellations today: 2,154
Total cancellations within, into, or out of the United States today: 816
Note that international flights to/from the U.S. are also affected.
flightaware.com still (at 7:30 ET) shows many planes in the air, which must have taken off before the outage.
Flights are taking off now (just after 9:00 a.m. ET). The ground stop has been lifted.
FAA Stats
Every day, FAA's Air Traffic Organization (ATO) provides service to more than 45,000 flights and 2.9 million airline passengers across more than 29 million square miles of airspace. At peak time, the average number of airborne flights = 5,400.
More stats at www.faa.gov/… and www.faa.gov/...
FAA does a stellar job of running a large and complex system. It is not perfect, but nothing in life is.
Epilogue
Yes, this will be frustrating for many. There will be anger and finger-pointing. The right will flood social media with statements that this is all Biden’s fault and how this did not happen when trump was president. There will be ugly cartoons mocking Biden and Secretary Buttigieg. This will be red meat for the peddlers of Conspiracy Theories.
Let’s not let the right drive the false narrative, let’s explain the truth to our friends and on social media that outages occasionally occur in all major software systems (Facebook, twitter, Amazon, Google, YouTube, DailyKos, .. to mention a few). On top of it, there are rogue state and non-state actors that want to attack the systems that run our infrastructure (e.g., power generation systems, hospitals, even astronomical observatories).
We should be amazed and thankful that these failures do not occur more often. Let’s support the hard-working personnel who keep this complex system running day in and day out, while maintaining a stellar safety record.
Update
According to ABC, the root cause seems to have been some maintenance done overnight, where an engineer inadvertently replaced a file with an incorrect one. Also, this part of the system is antiquated and due for a replacement.
Confirmation from the FAA -
