Flights grounded – latest: Canada’s system goes down after FAA outage as 8,500 US flights cancelled or delayed

Helen Coffey and Oliver O’Connell

Wed, 11 January 2023 at 8:29 pm GMT

The Federal Aviation Administration has lifted its suspension on all domestic US flight departures following a major IT failure.

A key system used to notify pilots and ground staff of hazards and alerts suffered a “major failure” earlier today, with FAA engineers frantically scrambling to resolve it after the outage prompted a nationwide ground stop.

The fault lay with the NOTAM (Notice to Air Missions) system, which keeps pilots and other airport staff updated about aviation hazards and airport facilities.

It stopped processing information this morning, forcing a temporary suspension of flights.

However, in its latest statement, the FAA said the ground stop “has been lifted”.

“Normal air traffic operations are resuming gradually across the United States following an overnight outage to the FAA’s Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system that provides safety information to flight crews,” it added.

Airlines are now struggling to get operations back on track with more than 7,300 delayed flights and over 1,100 cancellations at airports across the US, according to FlightAware. Most airlines are waiving fees for passengers to rebook travel.

Later on Wednesday across the border in Canada, the same system also malfunctioned but was quickly restored.