A nationwide FAA system outage on Wednesday morning grounded domestic flights, impacting passengers in Boston and across the U.S.
The FAA said it had ordered airlines to pause all domestic departures until 9 a.m. ET "to allow the agency to validate the integrity of flight and safety information" systems. By just before 9 a.m., the federal agency announced that normal air traffic operations were resuming gradually across the U.S., after it lifted the ground stop.
An investigation remained underway to find the cause of the problem.
Massachusetts Port Authority, the agency that operates Logan International Airport, asked passengers to check with their airline on the status of their flight before heading to the airport.
A departure board in Terminal B at Logan showed many flights being delayed until 9 a.m. or later.
As of around 8:20 a.m., FlightAware said there were 134 total delays at Logan Airport, and 3,704 total domestic delays.
The number of delays at Logan surpassed 250 by around 11:30 a.m., despite the ground stop having been lifted. Those residual delays were improving by late Wednesday afternoon, but the impacts continued to be felt, especially for those trying to make connecting flights.
"They had taken me down to the plane, stepping on the plane and was going to be seated and the pilot came out and said the plane was going to be delayed at least two hours," Loraine Jones said.
People were seen waiting around at terminal gates in the airport throughout the morning.
"It's kind of ridiculous that one little blip would shut the whole system down," Fred Keach said.
The issue involved an outage with the Notice to Air Missions system, which provides safety information to flight crews. Investigators said Wednesday they do not believe this was prompted by any kind of cyber attack.
