A computer glitch caused mass delays at airports across the US, authorities said on Tuesday.
The computer system that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) uses to process flight plans at six major airports crashed at around 1pm on Tuesday and delays soon approached two hours.
The Department of Homeland Security said there was no link to terrorism and the FAA said the computer glitch did not affect its ability to safely track planes.
Flights already in the air were not affected by the problem, FAA spokeswoman Tammy Jones said.
“There is no safety issue at all — it’s an efficiency issue,” Jones said.
“We are investigating what the problem was and in the meantime we’re managing the system and working with the airlines to make sure everything works as efficiently as we can have it work at this time,” she said.
The airports affected by the system failure were in Atlanta, Georgia; Boston, Massachusetts; Baltimore, Maryland; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Chicago, Illinois at two separate airports.
A slower backup system was able to process the flight plans and the glitch was soon identified, the FAA said.
All but two airports were back to normal traffic patterns by 7pm, although storms in Texas and New York added further complications to the air traffic system.
The FAA said its best guess was that “hundreds” of flights had been delayed by the computer breakdown.
The administration said it would not have an exact count until Wednesday.
The cause of the failure was not known but it was not due to a computer hacking attack, said Hank Krakowski, chief operations officer for the FAA’s air traffic division.
“It appears to be an internal software processing problem. We’re going to have to do some forensics on it,” he told reporters in a conference call.
FAA spokeswoman Diane Spitalire said the agency had never experienced a computer problem this severe.
An FAA communications outage in Memphis last year caused huge air-traffic snarls. The technicians’ union blamed FAA’s cost-cutting for reducing backup standards.
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