Flights across the United States were grounded Wednesday morning following a system outage according to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). All domestic departures will be paused until 9 a.m. EST.

The FAA said on its website that the outage was because its Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system had failed. According to the FAA, a NOTAM is “a notice containing information essential to personnel concerned with flight operations but not known far enough in advance to be publicized by other means.” 

According to the flight tracking website FlightAware, over 2,500 flights within, coming into and going out of the country have been delayed as of 8 a.m. on Wednesday

The FAA has since updated that the system is “beginning to come back on line,” but that it is still working to fully restore the NOTAM system and will need to ground all domestic flights “to allow the agency to validate the integrity of flight and safety information.” Certain departures have proceeded at Newark and Atlanta airports due to air traffic congestion, with others expected to resume at 9 a.m. eastern time.

Washington has announced that there is so far no evidence of a cyberattack, but President Joe Biden has directed the Department of Transportation to investigate.

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