Local News News U.S. airports rumble back to life after FAA computer outage Barbados Today11/01/20230164 views SOURCE: REUTERS WASHINGTON, Jan 11 (Reuters) – U.S flights were slowly beginning to resume departures and a ground stop was lifted after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) scrambled to fix a system outage overnight that had forced a halt to all U.S. departing flights. The cause of the problem with a pilot-alerting system, which delayed thousands of flights in the United States, was unclear, but U.S. officials said they had so far found no evidence of a cyberattack. The outage occurred at a historically slow time for U.S. travel after the December holiday travel season, but airlines have said demand remains strong as travel continues to recover to near pre-pandemic levels. “Normal air traffic operations are resuming gradually across the U.S. following an overnight outage to the Notice to Air Missions system that provides safety info to flight crews. The ground stop has been lifted. We continue to look into the cause of the initial problem,” the FAA Tweeted. The number of flights impacted continued to steadily rise even after the ground stop was canceled. One issue airlines are facing is trying to get planes in and out of crowded gates, which is causing further delays. More than 5,400 flights had been delayed and 900 canceled according to the FlightAware website as officials said it will take hours to recover from the halt to flights. The FAA had earlier ordered airlines to pause all domestic departures after its pilot alerting system crashed and the agency had to perform a hard reset around 2 a.m., officials said. The FAA is expected to implement a ground delay program in order to address the backlog of flights halted for hours. Flights already in the air had been allowed to continue to their destinations during the ground stop. U.S. President Joe Biden ordered the Transportation Department to investigate the outage and said the cause of the failure was unknown at this time. Asked if a cyber attack was behind the outage, Biden told reporters at the White House, “We don’t know.” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg pledged a “process to determine root causes and recommend next steps.” PHOTO: REUTERS