FAA: ‘No Evidence of a Cyber Attack’ at This Time

US-AVIATION-FAA-TRAVEL Travelers wait to hear if their flight will depart on time, at Los
STEFANI REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images
Hannah Knudsen

There is “no evidence” at this time that Wednesday’s Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system outage, temporarily resulting in grounded flights across the United States, was a result of a cyber attack, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced in an update Wednesday.

In a sixth update following the mass system failure, the FAA assured it is continuing to assess the damage but said the preliminary work “has traced the outage to a damaged database file.”

“At this time, there is no evidence of a cyber attack,” the FAA said.

“We are working diligently to further pinpoint the causes of this issue and take all needed steps to prevent this kind of disruption from happening again,” it continued:

The update followed Wednesday morning’s chaos, which resulted in the FAA temporarily grounding flights.

“A Notice to Air Missions alerts pilots about closed runways, equipment outages, and other potential hazards along a flight route or at a location that could affect the flight,” the FAA explained at the time.

Operations gradually resumed before 9:00 a.m. ET Wednesday:

However, the mass outage triggered thousands of delays which piled up throughout the day:

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who is coming fresh off the heels of scrutiny following travel chaos around the holidays, provided a video update Wednesday afternoon, explaining that authorities initiated a ground stop for safety reasons.

“It’s one of the reasons why today for example, while this issue was being worked out on the system side, there was this ground stop of about an hour and a half nationwide to make absolutely sure out of an abundance of caution that no aircraft could take off without the necessary safety information,” Buttigieg said, informing Americans that they are “always going to err on the side of safety.”

“Having said that, we also have to make sure we understand everything there is to understand about this situation so that we can ensure that disruption like that doesn’t happen again,” he added:

The FAA’s update followed Buttigieg’s appearance on MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports, where he said they were not prepared to rule out a domestic or foreign attack.

“We’re not prepared to rule that out. There hasn’t been any indication of that. The FBI has spoken to this, and of course, FAA is looking at that as well as they work to see exactly what was going on inside the files that were in the system leading to this irregularity,” he said, emphasizing at the time that there was “no direct indication of any kind of external or nefarious activity.”

Both the FAA and Department of Transportation (DOT) have come under scrutiny following these mounting travel woes, given the fact that both agencies appear to focus heavily on the so-called “climate crisis” as well as “equity” in their respective budget estimates for Fiscal Year (FY) 2023, as Breitbart News detailed.

An overview of the FAA’s FY 2023 budget states:

The FY 2023 budget request prioritizes safety as the foundation of everything the FAA does, while also helping the economy recover and rebuild from the COVID-19 pandemic, rising to the climate challenge, implementing the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and ensuring transportation is an engine for equity.

A conclusion of the document reads, “The FAA’s budget request for FY 2023 embodies the Administration’s priorities of mitigating climate change and increasing equity.”

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