As part of an announcement issued late last week, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) explained that the system outage which resulted in the grounding of all flights across the nation this past week was sparked by one contractor unintentionally removing some files.
Flights all over the United States were forcibly grounded in the wee hours of the morning on January 11th as the FAA’s Notice to Air Missions system unexpectedly, and entirely, crashed. Which sparked an extreme backlash against the FAA along with Pete Buttigieg, the Secretary of Transportation. Officials for the group found that “contract personnel unintentionally deleted files while working to correct synchronization between the live primary database and a backup database,” according to a statement issued by the FAA.
“The agency has so far found no evidence of a cyber-attack or malicious intent. The FAA continues to investigate the circumstances surrounding the outage,” the statement went on. “The FAA made the necessary repairs to the system and has taken steps to make the NOTAM system more resilient. The agency is acting quickly to adopt any other lessons learned in our efforts to ensure the continuing robustness of the nation’s air traffic control system.”
Officials had stated on the evening of January 11th that they would kick off a “thorough review” to find out the cause of the outage but explained that there was “no evidence of a cyber attack.”
These outages this past week ended up causing several hundred cancellations and thousands of delays throughout the airline industry and hurting countless individual travelers. One statement from Geoff Freeman, the U.S. Travel Association CEO, sounded the call for legislators to modernize the infrastructure of the country.
“Today’s FAA catastrophic system failure is a clear sign that America’s transportation network desperately needs significant upgrades,” he stated. “Americans deserve an end-to-end travel experience that is seamless and secure. And our nation’s economy depends on a best-in-class air travel system. We call on federal policymakers to modernize our vital air travel infrastructure to ensure our systems are able to meet demand safely and efficiently.”
These disruptions took place directly after a severe winter storm kicked off delays and cancellations across the nation for Southwest Airlines during the recent crazy Christmas travel season. The company ended up canceling close to 16,700 flights between the 21st and the 31st of December, as explained in a filing sent over to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which indicated that the overall losses from the ordeal is thought to be between $725 million and $825 million.
