NAV Canada, owner and operator of Canada’s civil air navigation service (ANS) tweeted yesterday that their NOTAM (Notice to Air Missions) entry system suffered an outage, a day after their U.S. equivalent, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) reported a similar issue.
The NOTAM system alerts pilots of potential hazards along the flight route.
NAV Canada said the outage lasted from 10:20 EST to 13:15 EST, and caused no delays or cancellations.
According to the body, the incident was not related to FAA’s NOTAM system failure, which led to the cancellations of more than 1,300 flights and delayed over 10,000, within, into and out of the U.S..
“We continue to monitor our systems and investigate the cause”, NAV Canada tweeted.
Later in the evening, the company affirmed that the disruption was caused by a computer hardware failure, and denied the possibility of a cyberattack.
In the U.S., the FAA’s systems have also been restored, and in their latest update, the agency linked the outage to a “damaged database file”, and also maintained that there is no evidence of a cyberattack.
“The FAA is working diligently to further pinpoint the causes of this issue and take all needed steps to prevent this kind of disruption from happening again.”
Both the primary and backup systems of the FAA’s NOTAM were impacted, according to a senior government official. Officials are also continuing investigations, NBC News reported.
So far, it is unclear whether travelers will receive any compensation. Usually the airlines provide compensation for delays, but this time the issue was caused by the government run-FAA. When asked by a reporter, U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg did not say whether the Transportation Department would pay compensation .
