US aviation system recovers after outage: over 6,400 flights cancelled

Gradual restoration of traffic

Flight schedules in the United States are expected to fully normalise only late on Sunday evening. This information was provided by the leadership of the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), as reported by the Reuters agency.

The country's aviation infrastructure is currently gradually returning to normal operations following a nationwide flight suspension. According to officials, the cause of the incident was a technical malfunction that occurred during scheduled maintenance work.

Scale of the outages

According to data from the aviation website FlightAware, as of Saturday evening, airlines had cancelled over 6,400 flights in the US, while more than 8,000 flights were delayed.

This followed the cancellation of approximately 9,200 flights and delays to 7,500 flights on Friday. At that time, the FAA ordered a suspension of all flights in the country due to problems in the communication system that ensures air traffic control.

On Sunday, 875 flights had already been cancelled in the United States.

Causes of the incident

The nationwide departure ban introduced on Friday became the longest suspension of air traffic since the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. This day also went down in history as one of the worst for travel in the US.

Due to the incident, the White House convened an emergency meeting in the Situation Room on Friday, and federal agencies began an urgent investigation to determine whether a cyberattack was the cause of the malfunction.

However, Transport Secretary Sean Duffy stated on Saturday that the true cause of the problem turned out to be the installation by FAA contractor L3Harris of at least one new router at a remote facility. Work to replace a copper cable with a fibre optic one caused a router malfunction, which overloaded part of the data transmission system between air traffic controllers and aircraft.