WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A preliminary investigation by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said on Monday that contractors “unintentionally deleted files” disrupted critical computer systems and urged a nationwide ground stop, and said more than 11,000 flights were disrupted. .
According to the FAA, the issue occurred while personnel were working to “fix the synchronization between the live primary database and the backup database.” The FAA said, “To date, we have found no evidence of a cyberattack or malicious intent.”
Acting FAA Administrator Billy Nollen issued a statement on Friday to lawmakers and staff seeking details about the problems with the pilot message database that led to the grounding of outbound flights nationwide for the first time since the September 11, 2001 attacks. will hold a virtual briefing.
Last week, the agency said a computer outage in the Notice to Air Mission (NOTAM) messaging system was caused by a procedural error related to corrupted data files. The NOTAM system provides important safety notices to pilots, flight crews, and other users in US airspace.
The FAA said it made the necessary repairs to the system and “taken steps to make the pilot message system more resilient.”
The outage occurred on January 10th, but the FAA groundstop was not issued until the following morning.
Last week, a group of more than 120 U.S. lawmakers told the FAA that the computer outage was “totally unacceptable” and called on the FAA to explain how to avoid future accidents.
Senate Commerce Committee staff also asked the FAA to answer questions about the suspension, such as, “Why are airlines in a position to have the option of choosing to operate when the NOTAM system goes down?” asked to answer.
Reported by David Shepardson. Edited by Sandra Maler and Leslie Adler
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