US flights were slowly beginning to resume departures and a ground stop was lifted after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) scrambled to fix a system outage overnight that had forced a halt to all US departing flights.
The cause of the problem, which delayed thousands of flights in the United States, was unclear, but US officials said they had so far found no evidence of a cyberattack.
“Normal air traffic operations are resuming gradually across the US 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 said in a Tweet.
More than 4,300 flights had been delayed and 700 canceled as officials said it will take hours to recover from the halt to flights.
The FAA had earlier ordered airlines to pause all domestic departures after its pilot alerting system crashed and the agency had to perform a hard reset around 2 a.m., officials said.
The FAA said shortly before 8:30 a.m. departures were resuming at Newark and Atlanta airports.
The FAA is expected to implement a ground delay program in order to address the backlog of flights halted for hours. Flights already in the air had been allowed to continue to their destinations during the ground stop.—AFP
