About 2 million passengers and thousands of flights were affected by a widespread computer failure on January 11.
The computer outage that forced the US civil aviation regulator (FAA) to temporarily suspend US domestic flights on January 11 was caused by a contractor mistakenly deleting files, it said on Thursday 19 January the FAA.
The agency had previously blamed the failure, which caused thousands of cancellations and delays on January 11, on a damaged database file. A preliminary report showed that a subcontractor had, “unintentionally erased files while working on synchronization between primary and standby database”, the agency said on Thursday. The investigation is continuing, but the agency claims to have found no evidence linking the incident to a malicious act or a cyberattack.
A “more resilient” system in the future
On the other hand, the FAA takes measures so that the information system concerned, intended to warn in real time the crew members of an aircraft of potential dangers on the ground or in the sky, either “more resilient”. The US Minister of Transport, Pete Buttigieg, said on January 11 that he had asked the FAA to determine the causes of the problem and to explain why the systems supposed to take over in the event of problems had not worked.
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