As reported by CNN, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said that “technicians are currently working to restore the system and there is no estimate for restoration of the service at this time.” A statement in response read, “We are performing final validation checks and repopulating the system now. Operations across the National Airspace System are affected. We will provide frequent updates as we make progress.” NOTAMs, or Notice to Air Missions, relay essential information to pilots for each flight, such as weather conditions, construction at airports, or anything else that could impact a flight but isn’t known far enough in advance to announce in other ways, as the official FAA website states. Although flights around and out of the United States were grounded, the FAA was able to ensure a workaround so that flights coming into the U.S. out of European airports in cities like Amsterdam and Paris could continue. Later in the morning, the FAA released another statement: “The FAA has ordered airlines to pause all domestic departures until 9 a.m. Eastern Time to allow the agency to validate the integrity of flight and safety information.” According to CNN, President Joe Biden told reporters the FAA “don’t know what the cause of [the outage] is. They expect in a couple of hours they’ll have a good sense of what caused it and will respond at that time.” Although the FAA declared that all domestic flights would be paused until 9 a.m., some airports were able to resume service a little earlier, like Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre shared in a tweet, “There is no evidence of a cyberattack at this point, but the President directed DOT to conduct a full investigation into the causes.” As of writing, there have been over 6,400 delays into, out of, and within the United States today, according to the tracking website FlightAware.
