Damaged Database Likely Cause for NOTAM Outage, FAA Says

'No evidence of a cyberattack,' FAA said following a preliminary investigation.

Meg Godlewski

Wednesday, January 11, 2023 at 09:55 PM ET

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The FAA blames a damaged database file for the NOTAM issue that ground air traffic to a halt. [Credit: Shutterstock]

Key Takeaways:

The FAA's Notice to Air Missions (NOTAMs) system outage, which caused a nationwide ground stop and thousands of flight disruptions, was likely due to a damaged database file.
The NOTAMs system provides essential safety information for pilots, and its malfunction prompted the FAA to pause all domestic departures to validate flight and safety data integrity.
Preliminary work found no evidence of a cyberattack, and the FAA is actively investigating to prevent similar future disruptions.
Approximately 4,000 flights were impacted by delays and cancellations as a result of the system failure.

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A damaged database file is the likely root cause of the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAMs) system outage that resulted in a ground stop and thousands of delayed and canceled flights Wednesday, according to the FAA.

“Our preliminary work has traced the outage to a damaged database file,” the agency said in a statement released Wednesday evening. “At this time, there is no evidence of a cyberattack. The FAA is working diligently to further pinpoint the causes of this issue and take all needed steps to prevent this kind of disruption from happening again.”