A few weeks ago, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) suspended all flight departures in the United States, essentially grounding all flights for a few hours.
The agency did not immediately share the reason for the outage, leading to speculation about a possible cyber attack(Opens in a new window)and prompting President Joe Biden to order a Department of Transportation (DOT) investigation.
Now, however, we know the reason was much simpler: someone deleted files they shouldn’t have.
In an official statement(Opens in a new window) released last Thursday, the FAA said a preliminary review “determined that contract personnel had unintentionally deleted files while working to correct synchronization between the main live database and a backup database.”
“The agency has so far found no evidence of a cyber attack or malicious intent,” the statement continued.
While this is certainly better news than a cyberattack or malware infection, the fact that mishandling certain files could ground all US flights is worrisome, something the FAA seems to be aware of.
“The FAA has made the necessary repairs to the system and has taken steps to make the NOTAM system more resilient. The agency is moving quickly to adopt any further lessons learned in our efforts to ensure the continued robustness of the air traffic control system country.” the agency said.
