The Federal Aviation Administration said on Thursday that the system outage that delayed or canceled thousands of flights earlier this month was caused by contractors accidentally deleting files for its alert system.
In a statement, the FAA said a review of the outage of the Notice to Air Missions system showed that "contract personnel unintentionally deleted files while working to correct synchronization between the live primary database and a backup database."
The FAA also stated that it has not found evidence of "a cyberattack or malicious intent."
"The FAA made the necessary repairs to the system and has taken steps to make the NOTAM system more resilient. The agency is acting quickly to adopt any other lessons learned in our efforts to ensure the continuing robustness of the nation's air traffic control system," the statement continued.
The agency had to temporarily suspend all domestic flight departures earlier this month as it worked to fix its NOTAM system, which caused mass delays and cancellations.
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