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 who mistakenly deleted files, the FAA said on Thursday (January 19).
The agency previously blamed the error, which caused thousands of cancellations and delays on January 11, on a corrupted database file. A preliminary report showed that a subcontractor had, “accidentally deleted files while working on synchronization between primary and standby database”, the agency informs on Thursday. The investigation continues, but the agency claims to have found no evidence linking the incident to a malicious act or cyber attack.
A “more resilient” system in the future
On the other hand, the FAA takes measures so that the information system in question, which is intended to warn the crew members of an aircraft in real time of potential dangers on the ground or in the sky, either “more resilient”. US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said on January 11 that he had asked the FAA to determine the causes of the problem and explain why the systems that were supposed to take over in the event of problems had not worked.
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