Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said his agency isn’t ruling out the possibility of “nefarious activity” being behind a computer outage that grounded all U.S. flights on Jan. 11.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which is overseen by Buttigieg’s agency, halted all domestic flights after a problem with the Notice to Air Missions system that relays real-time flight hazards to pilots. The cause of the hour-long outage hasn’t been determined.
“We’re not prepared to rule that out,” Buttigieg told MSNBC when he was asked if foul play, such as a cyberattack, was involved. “There hasn’t been any indication of that.”
The Jan. 11 incident was the first national grounding of flights since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, officials told Reuters.
Buttigieg, a former presidential candidate, stressed that there’s no evidence that indicates malign actors were involved in the outage, while a similar statement was issued by White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Twitter.
“There is no direct indication of any kind of external or nefarious activity, but we are not yet prepared to rule that out,” Buttigieg said, and Jean-Pierre said there is “no evidence of a cyberattack.”
President Joe Biden was briefed on the outage and spoke with Buttigieg during the morning, the president told reporters. Like Buttigieg, Biden said it isn’t clear what caused the outage.
“They don’t know what the cause is,” Biden told reporters. “I told them to report directly to me when they find out. Aircraft can still land safely, just not take off right now. They don’t know what the cause of it is, they expect in a couple of hours they’ll have a good sense of what caused it and will respond at that time.”
The ground stop was the “right call” to make sure messages were moving correctly and there was no direct evidence of a cyberattack, Buttigieg said.
“[The] FAA has determined that the safety system affected by the overnight outage is fully restored, and the nationwide ground stop will be lifted effective immediately,” he said in a separate statement on Jan. 11. “I have directed an after-action process to determine root causes and recommend next steps.”
An FAA advisory said the system that provides so-called Notices to Air Missions with safety messages for pilots and others failed in the afternoon on Jan. 10, which meant no new messages could be processed. While the outage occurred at a typically slow time after the holiday travel season, demand remains strong as travel continues to recover to near pre-pandemic levels.
‘Catastrophic’
Airline and industry groups, meanwhile, sharply criticized the Biden administration and FAA for the system failure.“And our nation’s economy depends on a best-in-class air travel system,” he said. “We call on federal policymakers to modernize our vital air travel infrastructure to ensure our systems are able to meet demand safely and efficiently.”
The FAA confirmed earlier this month that it had encountered a separate significant computer error on Jan. 2 that led to delays in Florida. The agency later said in a statement that a “computer issue” was behind the delays and that it had been resolved.
The outage appeared to have limited effect on trans-Atlantic routes, with European carriers including Lufthansa, Air France, Iberia, and British Airways saying flights are continuing in and out of the United States. Virgin Atlantic cautioned that some flights might be delayed.
