At Cognixia podcast, every week we bring you a bite-size dosage of the latest happenings, discussions, guides, and a lot more from the world of emerging digital technologies.

This week we talk about something major that happened earlier in January 2023. A computer outage at the Federal Aviation Administration brought flights across the United States to a complete standstill, with hundreds of delays quickly cascading through the systems at airports worldwide. The US government confirmed that there was no evidence of a cyberattack. In this episode, we will delve deeper into what happened that day.

The Federal Aviation Administration or the FAA has a system that sends vital communication to the pilots. This system experienced a massive outage causing thousands of flights to be grounded. This system is called the NOTAM or Notice to Air Missions. Before a flight takes off, the pilots and airline dispatchers in the US are required to review the notices in the NOTAM. This would include important information about the weather runway closures, ongoing construction work, etc. which would be required for the flight’s smooth journey. Earlier, NOTAM used to be telephone-based, however, over time, NOTAM was moved online.

The NOTAM system broke down earlier in January 2023 and it was a few hours before the system came back up, but not before 1200 flight cancelations and more than 7800 delays on the East coast itself. Some of the busiest airports in the world – Chicago, New York, Los Angeles Atlanta, etc. are in the United States and they saw between 30 to 40% of flights being delayed due to this outage. 

A few days after the incident, it was revealed that unspecified personnel were responsible for corrupting a file in the system, which caused the outage of the FAA NOTAM’s computer system. According to a Fortune News Report, FAA does have stringent procedures in place to ensure that data doesn’t get damaged by technicians when they are working on the systems.

Reportedly, when the system began having issues, the technicians working with the NOTAM system switched to the backup systems. Unfortunately, the backup systems were trying to access the same damaged files as the original systems leading to system breakdown. To restore the system, a complete shutdown became essential. This, in turn, called for about 90 minutes of a complete halt on all flight departures to be announced by the FAA.  

The Ponemon Institute predicts that on average the cost of an unplanned outage like the one NOTAM experienced runs to about $9000 per minute, leading to $540,000 per hour. There would be many other indirect costs over and above this as well. Building system resilience is extremely important. Every enterprise today is at enough risk from the outside world, the least it can do is to minimize risk from internal factors like outages and breakdowns because the system was not resilient enough. These things can go a long way in safeguarding an organization’s interests and reputation while eliminating the possibility of incurring tremendous losses due to these issues.