FAA Orders Domestic Flight Departures Across US to be Paused Until 9:30 a.m. EST Wednesday

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has ordered all domestic flight departures across the United States to be paused until at least 9:30 a.m. EST on Wednesday. The agency said the pause was necessary to allow it to validate the integrity of flight and safety information, as the system providing pilots with pre-flight safety notices had gone offline.

The FAA said it was performing final validation checks and repopulating the system, while Airlines for America, the association representing US airlines, said the outage was causing “significant operational delays”. United Airlines said it had temporarily delayed all flights due to the outage.

At around 7:45 EST, there were more than 2,500 delays within, into or out of the United States, according to the flight tracking website FlightAware.com. The FAA said the pause does not affect military or medical flights.

The FAA has not yet commented on the cause of the outage or how long it is expected to last. It is unclear how many flights have been affected by the pause, but the agency said it was working to restore the NOTAMS (Notice to Air Missions) system as soon as possible.