All outbound domestic flights at airports across the U.S. were grounded Wednesday morning until 9am Eastern Time because of a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) computer outage.
The grounding impacted more than 1,200 flights staring at around 7am, according to online flight tracker FlightAware. A little more than 100 flights were listed as canceled altogether.
Inbound flights already en route to their destinations were reported safe to land.
The White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre tweeted soon after the outage, “The President has been briefed by the Secretary of Transportation this morning on the FAA system outage. There is no evidence of a cyberattack at this point, but the President directed DOT to conduct a full investigation into the causes. The FAA will provide regular updates.”
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg also tweeted, saying, “I have been in touch with FAA this morning about an outage affecting a key system for providing safety information to pilots. FAA is working to resolve this issue swiftly and safely so that air traffic can resume normal operations, and will continue to provide updates.”
NBC News Aviation Analyst John Cox said on MSNBC to expect a “ripple effect” of delays and cancelations that will go “well into tomorrow and possibly into the day after.”
The outage and grounding come as the Department of Transportation was investigating and the U.S. Senate was set to hold hearings on the thousands of flight cancellations by Southwest Airlines that left travelers stranded at airports when a massive winter storm swept across the country during the holidays.
