Air travelers nationwide scrambled to revise their plans Thursday after an FAA computer glitch caused widespread cancellations and delays for the second time in 15 months.
The Federal Aviation Administration said the problem, which lasted about four hours, was fixed around 9 a.m. EST, but it was unclear how long flights would be affected.
It started when a single circuit board in a piece of networking equipment at a computer center in Salt Lake City failed around 5 a.m., the FAA said.
That failure prevented air traffic control computers in different parts of the country from talking to each other. Air traffic controllers were forced to type in complicated flight plans themselves because they could not be transferred automatically from computers in one region to computers in another, slowing down the whole system.
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Delays were particularly bad at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, the world's busiest. The glitch also exacerbated delays caused by bad weather in the Northeast, creating problems for airports in the Chicago, Washington, D.C., and New York metro areas.
Some flights were more than two hours behind schedule. Airports around the South also reported delays and cancellations.
U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-New York, said the country's aviation system is "in shambles" and the FAA needs more resources to prevent such problems from continuing.