Recent speculations of a cyberattack have been proven false by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) after further investigation. On January 11th, over 10,000 US flights were grounded, the highest number since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. A simple mistake from an engineer led to a damaged database file corrupting the main system and all of its backup programs, but thankfully the FAA was able to fix the problem two hours later. Most people who were on a time-sensitive schedule had to rebook their flights, however, and Delta Air Lines issued a fare difference waiver to its passengers so that the rebooking process would not charge any passenger additional fees to rebook or change their flights. 

Situations like these can cost airlines thousands if not millions of dollars. In order to avoid situations like these, airlines have backup plans to quickly and effectively fix the problem before it affects the passengers’ experience. Since all of the backups were also corrupted, the FAA had to reboot their systems, fixing the corrupted data at the sacrifice of a couple of hours’ worth of profit. Although events like these can hurt the business of airlines across the US, future precautions by the FAA will ensure that this will not happen again.