The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced on Sunday that its primary system for sending real-time safety alerts to pilots is operational again, after being down for several hours. The NOTAM (Notice to Air Missions) system, which provides critical information about hazards in the air or on the ground, was restored by 11 a.m. Eastern time.
According to the FAA, there were no significant disruptions to U.S. air travel despite warnings of potential flight delays. The agency had previously stated that it was using a contingency program to send safety alerts during the outage.
The cause of the outage is currently under investigation. This marks the latest incident in the FAA’s modernization efforts for the NOTAM system, which has experienced technical issues before.
In January 2023, a similar failure led to thousands of flight delays and was attributed to human error caused by contractors mistakenly deleting files from the system. The FAA provides air traffic service to over 45,000 flights daily across the vast national airspace system covering over 29 million square miles in the United States.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/02/us/notam-outage-faa-alerts.html