President Joe Biden told reporters from the White House Wednesday morning that he "doesn't know" whether the abrupt FAA grounding of all flights in the United States was in response to a cyber attack. He provided little information after a discussion with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
"I just spoke with [Transportation Secretary] Buttigieg. They don't know what the cause is. But I was on the phone with him," Biden said on the South Lawn. "I told them to report directly to me when they find out. Aircraft can still land safely, just not take off right now. They don't know what the cause of it is, they expect in a couple of hours they'll have a good sense of what caused it and will respond at that time."
The FAA grounded all domestic departures in the U.S. on Wednesday morning after an overnight outage of its NOTAM System. White House says no evidence of a cyber attack, but ordered a full DOT investigation of the latest transportation mess for Buttigieg. https://t.co/RXSI8vtPoJ
— Spencer Brown (@itsSpencerBrown) January 11, 2023
The unusual grounding of all flights by the FAA hasn't happened since September 11, 2001.
Meanwhile, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean Pierre is also saying there is "no evidence" of an an attack.
The President has been briefed by the Secretary of Transportation this morning on the FAA system outage. There is no evidence of a cyberattack at this point, but the President directed DOT to conduct a full investigation into the causes. The FAA will provide regular updates.
— Karine Jean-Pierre (@PressSec) January 11, 2023
As of 9:00 a.m. eastern time, flights have resumed.
Update 5: Normal air traffic operations are resuming gradually across the U.S. following an overnight outage to the Notice to Air Missions system that provides safety info to flight crews. The ground stop has been lifted.
— The FAA ✈️ (@FAANews) January 11, 2023
We continue to look into the cause of the initial problem