The Federal Aviation Administration said Thursday that a contractor working with the agency accidentally triggered the system outage last week that suspended thousands of flights.
The unnamed company unintentionally removed files in the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system, which sends real-time information about potential hazards to pilots on their routes, the Wall Street Journal first reported.
“The agency has so far found no evidence of a cyberattack or malicious intent,” the FAA told the publication. The agency has also reportedly fixed deficiencies in the system and adapted it to make it capable of withstanding such errors in the future.
The FAA’s initial assessment of the problem last week was that “a data file was damaged by personnel who failed to follow procedures.”
More than 2,500 flights within, into and out of the United States were delayed as a result of the system failure, according to FlightAware. The outage caused the FAA to pause all domestic departures for nearly two hours.
The airlines and Department of Transportation rushed to provide updates on the situation. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said at the time that the FAA was working to resolve the problem as soon as possible so that air traffic could resume normal operations.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the president directed the Department of Transportation “to conduct a full investigation into the causes” of the failure. After the pause in flight operations, flights across the United States started gradually resuming.
While some critics pointed to the outage as evidence of government ineptitude, urging the privatization of air-traffic control, the head of Delta Air Lines called on lawmakers to increase funding for the FAA. Acknowledging that the incident was “unacceptable,” Delta CEO Ed Bastian suggested the FAA was not to blame.
“I lay this on the fact that we are not giving them the resources, the funding, the staffing, the tools, the technology they need,” he said. “Hopefully this will be the call to our political leaders in Washington that we need to do better.”