The air traffic situation in the United States is clearly improving. Over 1,200 flights were cancelled yesterday, while another 8,000 accumulated several hours of delay, forcing at least 150,000 passengers to abandon their journey. Currently excluded a cyber attack. Now the country is wondering about the causes of the IT failure that blocked the air system.  

This decision was made by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Tuesday evening (8:28 in Washington, 2:28 on Wednesday morning in Italy) due to a computer problem that lasted almost 12 hours. The Notams (Notice To Air Missions) system, that is the information bulletins on the situation at the airports, the condition of the runways, the weather, had gone haywire.

At one point the messages were transmitted over the phone, which hadn't happened in years, in the hope that the system would recover, but it hasn't. In the early hours of Wednesday morning, with hundreds of flights scheduled every five minutes from US airports, the FAA decided to halt operations at the airports, allowing only medical and military flights.

President Joe Biden has asked the US Department of Transportation to conduct a full investigation into the causes of the malfunction. The White House has declared that there is no evidence that a hacker attack was behind the failure. For now, the FAA's digital infrastructure ends up under accusation: a platform that manages the information flow considered dated and weighed down by different systems implemented.