Thousands of flights have been delayed or cancelled following a mass system failure grounded commercial U.S. flights Wednesday morning, according to data from Flight Aware.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced early Wednesday morning that it had experienced a Notice to Air Missions System outage, prompting the agency to temporarily halt all domestic departures until 9 a.m. ET. At the time, the FAA clarified that flights currently in the sky were, indeed, safe to land, as pilots check the NOTAM system before taking off.
“A Notice to Air Missions alerts pilots about closed runways, equipment outages, and other potential hazards along a flight route or at a location that could affect the flight,” the FAA explained, continuing to report its progress throughout the morning.
The FAA initially announced that departures were resuming at Newark Liberty International Airport as well as Atlanta, and in a fifth update posted at 8:50 a.m. ET, the FAA reported that “normal air traffic operations are resuming gradually across the U.S. following an overnight outage to the Notice to Air Missions system that provides safety info to flight crews.”
“The ground stop has been lifted. We continue to look into the cause of the initial problem,” it added:
Cleared Update No. 2 for all stakeholders: ⁰⁰The FAA is still working to fully restore the Notice to Air Missions system following an outage. ⁰⁰While some functions are beginning to come back on line, National Airspace System operations remain limited.
— The FAA ✈️ (@FAANews) January 11, 2023
All flights currently in the sky are safe to land. Pilots check the NOTAM system before they fly. A Notice to Air Missions alerts pilots about closed runways, equipment outages, and other potential hazards along a flight route or at a location that could affect the flight.
— The FAA ✈️ (@FAANews) January 11, 2023
Update 5: Normal air traffic operations are resuming gradually across the U.S. following an overnight outage to the Notice to Air Missions system that provides safety info to flight crews. The ground stop has been lifted.
We continue to look into the cause of the initial problem
— The FAA ✈️ (@FAANews) January 11, 2023
However, the outage has caused mass delays across the country. As of 11:20 a.m. ET , there were 6,477 delayed flights within, into, or out of the U.S. U.S.-related cancellations, as of that same time, stood at 1,052:
Almost every flight at DCA has either been cancelled or delayed pic.twitter.com/4suxDdkYm6
— Jon Michael Raasch (@JMRaasch) January 11, 2023
This story is developing. More to come…
