NEW YORK — The ground stop and Federal Aviation Administration systems failures Wednesday morning that impacted thousands of flights across the U.S. appear to have been the result of a mistake that occurred during routine scheduled systems maintenance, according to a senior official briefed on the internal review.
An engineer “replaced one file with another,” the official said, not realizing the mistake was being made. As the systems began showing problems and ultimately failed, FAA staff feverishly tried to figure out what had gone wrong. The engineer who made the error did not realize what had happened.Earlier Wednesday, the FAA said normal operations were"resuming gradually" after ordering a nationwide pause on all domestic departures until 9 a.m.
"The FAA is still working to fully restore the Notice to Air Missions system following an outage," said the FAA announcing the temporary grounding of all planes nationwide."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."
"When there's an issue in the FAA that needs to be looked at, we're gonna own it, same way we asked the airlines to own their companies and operations," Buttigieg said during an appearance on CNN Wednesday.On what caused the system meltdown, Buttigieg said that overnight there"was an issue with irregularities in the messages that were going out" -- though more needs to be learned on what led to the widespread failure.
The FAA first reported the system failure on Tuesday, according to an internal memo from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency obtained by ABC News.The official compared the current outage to the crisis that crippled Southwest Airlines during the holidays: antiquated software overdue for replacement inside a critical IT network. If one thing goes down, the system can become paralyzed.
Republican Sen. Ted Cruz criticized the FAA's management of the system and called for an explanation of issues.
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