Air chaos after U.S. grounds hundreds of flights when computer system goes down

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At various points throughout the day on Wednesday depending on where you lived, you couldn’t fly, buy a bottle of wine online, or even hope for a letter from Britain.

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The technology that makes all that possible these days failed us.

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No one could yet say whether it was the work of cyber criminals or worn-out equipment malfunctioning.

It began first thing in the morning with an alert from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration that the computer system called the Notice to Air Missions, or NOTAM, had broken down at 8:28 ET the night before.

All pilots are required to check NOTAM before a flight. It keeps a list of all potential adverse impacts on flights, from runway construction to the potential for icing. When it goes down, planes aren’t allowed off the ground.

By early afternoon, 1,200 U.S. flights had been cancelled and more than 8,200 delayed, according to flight-tracking website FlightAware. Airports in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and Atlanta were seeing between 30 and 40 per cent of flights delayed.

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The chaos lingered even after the problem was fixed at 9 a.m. ET and the FAA had lifted the order grounding planes.

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Canada’s NOTAM entry system also experienced an outage between 10:20 a.m. and 1:15 p.m. ET on Wednesday, said Nav Canada’s manager of government and media relations.

“We are still investigating the root cause of the failure,” Vanessa Adams wrote in an email.

“At this time, we do not believe the cause is related to the FAA outage experienced earlier today.”

WestJet said six flights were delayed Wednesday morning but none were cancelled, while Air Canada said the outage would have an effect on its transborder operations, but that it was not possible to determine the extent of the delays.

Air Canada added it was putting in place a goodwill policy for affected customers to change their travel plans, though it did not offer further details.

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Some U.S. medical flights could get clearance and the outage did not affect any U.S. military operations.

“Now we have to understand how this could have happened in the first place,” said  U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg in an interview on CNN. “Why the usual redundancies that would stop it from being that disruptive did not stop it from being disruptive this time.”

He said the ground stop was the “right call” to make sure messages were moving correctly and there is no direct evidence of cyberattack.

Longtime aviation insiders could not recall an outage of such magnitude caused by a technology breakdown. Some compared it to the nationwide shutdown of airspace after the terror attacks of September 2001.

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“Periodically there have been local issues here or there, but this is pretty significant historically,” said Tim Campbell, a former senior vice president of air operations at American Airlines and now a consultant in Minneapolis.

Campbell said there has long been concern about the FAA’s technology, and not just the NOTAM system.

“So much of their systems are old mainframe systems that are generally reliable, but they are out of date,” he said.

John Cox, a former airline pilot and aviation safety expert, said there has been talk in the aviation industry for years about trying to modernize the NOTAM system, but he did not know the age of the servers that the FAA uses.

He couldn’t say whether a cyberattack was possible.

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“I’ve been flying 53 years. I’ve never heard the system go down like this,” Cox said. “So something unusual happened.”

President Joe Biden, who is in Mexico for the North American leaders summit, said he’s directed the Department of Transportation to investigate.

“I just spoke to Buttigieg. They don’t know what the cause is. But I was on the phone with him about 10 minutes,” Biden said in the morning. “I told him to report directly to me when they find out.”

At a news conference in Port Colborne, Ont., Canada’s Transport Minister, Omar Alghabra, said he, too, had contacted Buttigieg about the NOTAM troubles.

“This was obviously a surprise. It was an unplanned interruption,” Alghabra said.

“We still don’t know all the facts yet, but good news is that I am hearing that traffic has restarted again, so we will stay in coordination with our U.S. partners to understand what had happened and what can we do to avoid similar interruptions.”

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Meanwhile, the Liquor Control Board of Ontario said Wednesday it was investigating a “cybersecurity incident” that had knocked out its website and mobile app on Tuesday.

The provincial Crown corporation said its website and mobile app remain unavailable.

LCBO shops were not affected.

And in London on Wednesday, Britain’s postal service said it was hit by a “cyber incident” that was temporarily preventing it from sending letters or parcels to other countries.

Royal Mail reported on its website that international export services were “experiencing severe service disruption” without providing further details.

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“We are temporarily unable to dispatch items to overseas destinations,” the service said, adding that it recommended customers hold on to mail destined for outside the country while it works on fixing the problem.

“Some customers may experience delay or disruption to items already shipped for export,” Royal Mail said.

The British government’s National Cyber Security Center said it was aware of the incident and was working with Royal Mail and the National Crime Agency “to fully understand the impact.”

Services for mail coming into the country are operating with minor delays, Royal Mail said.

In December, Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children was struck by a ransomware attack, knocking out its systems that are only now 80 per cent restored.

A notorious ransomware group later apologized for the attack, claiming it was carried out by one of its partners.

Ontario’s Cybersecurity Expert Panel concluded in a report last September that the broader public-services sector needed more work to achieve “cyber maturity.”

With additional reporting by The Associated Press and The Canadian Press