The Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) of USA manages many regulatory and technical aspects of the aviation industry in the US.
One of the things it manages is NOTAM – Notice to Air Missions system. This system gives pilots real time information about hazards (dangers) on flight routes.
On January 11 local time, the FAA informed everyone that the NOTAM system was not working. As a precaution, all domestic (flights within USA) were grounded (not allowed to take off) while FAA worked on restoring the system.
About 1,162 domestic flights were affected.
According to the latest update by FAA, systems are slowly being restored.
About an hour ago (1845 hours IST), Newark and Atlanta were allowed to start departures (take offs) because of the heavy congestion at these airports.
FAA has not given a reason for the outage. They have just mentioned that they will continue to investigate what led to the outage.
Update: 0100 hours, 12th January 2023
At this time, the airports in US are slowly trying to schedule all the delayed flights. Experts believe it could be a few days before things are normal.
On the same day (January 11 2023), a few hours after the FAA incident, the NOTAM system of Canadian Aviation also experienced a glitch. The following statement was released by the Canadian authority:
Followed by this one:
At this time, NAV does not think the two outages were linked. Also, unlike USA, Canada reported no flight disruptions at all because of the glitch.
Both agencies have not been able to share the reason for the malfunction.