A massive Federal Aviation Administration outage on Wednesday was blamed on a “damaged database file.”
The FAA dismissed speculation that the outage was caused by a cyberattack, saying they had found no evidence indicating as much. The sudden outage of its Notice to Air Missions system, which sends safety notifications to pilots, temporarily grounded all domestic flights in the United States. A hard reset of the system appeared to fix the issue.
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“The FAA is continuing a thorough review to determine the root cause of the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system outage,” the agency said in a statement. “Our preliminary work has traced the outage to a damaged database file. At this time, there is no evidence of a cyber attack. The FAA is working diligently to further pinpoint the causes of this issue and take all needed steps to prevent this kind of disruption from happening again.”
The debacle renewed Republican criticisms of the agency, which critics claim has declined in quality due to a shortage of experienced staff.
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The incident “underscores the number of empty desks and vacant offices at the FAA,” Rep. Sam Graves (R-MO), the new chairman of the House Transportation Committee, said, according to Axios. “Centuries of combined experience has gone out the door in the past several years and far too few of these positions have been filled,” he added. “The FAA does not run on autopilot — it needs skilled, dedicated, and permanent leadership in positions across the agency, starting with the administrator’s office.”
