President Joe Biden has ordered an investigation into an FAA system outage that grounded flights across the country Wednesday morning and said the cause of the failure was unknown. Biden told reporters at the White House he had spoken to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and they should have a good sense in a couple of hours of what triggered the outage.
“We’ll respond at that time,” Biden said. Asked if the outage was caused by a cyberattack, he said, “We don’t know.” “They don’t know what the cause is,” Biden said. “Aircraft can still land safely just not take off right now. We don’t know what the cause of it is.”
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said earlier in a Twitter post that there was no evidence of a cyber attack at this time. U.S. flights were grounded or delayed on Wednesday as the FAA scrambled to fix a system outage, with passengers told to check with airlines for updates.
The FAA said it had ordered airlines to pause all domestic departures until 9 a.m. ET (1400 GMT) to allow the agency to validate the integrity of flight and safety information. Meanwhile, furious passengers experienced hour-long delays after a system failure forced officials to ground thousands of flights across the US – the worst airspace disaster since the terror attacks of September 2001.
According to TheSun, The Federal Aviation Administration first reported a system failure overnight on Tuesday and slowly began restoring normal air traffic operations. Almost 5,000 delays were reported within, into, or out of the US early Wednesday, according to Flight Aware, with nearly 900 flights axed by 10 am.
More than 21,000 flights were expected to take off in the US today, data from the aviation company Cirium revealed. FAA officials initially urged airlines to pause domestic departures until 9 am ET, but a spokesperson for the agency told The U.S. Sun that the ground stop has been lifted. Aviation insiders said the outage was the worst airspace shutdown they’ve experienced since the 9/11 terror attacks.
“Periodically, there have been local issues here or there, but this is pretty significant historically,” Tim Campbell, a former senior vice president of air operations at American Airlines, told the Associated Press. “This is unheard of, and then the action that the FAA had to take in grounding all the flights makes it even more significant,” former FAA official Michael McCormick told the Washington Post.
