White House rules out cyberattack on FAA; cause not clear, says US prez Biden

Washington, Jan 12: There is no evidence of a cyberattack being the cause of a system outage at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that has caused hundreds of flights to be delayed, the White House said .

"There is no evidence of a cyberattack at this point. The President has directed the Department of Transportation to conduct a full investigation into the causes and provide regular updates. Again, this is incredibly important, a top priority, the safety of Americans who are flying every day," PTI quoted White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre as telling reporters at her daily news conference.

"We want to make sure that they're safe. This is a top priority for the President, top priority for the Department of Transportation and certainly the FAA. And so we want to make sure that we get to the root causes so this does not happen again," she said. "There is no evidence of a cyber attack at this point, but the President directed DOT to conduct a full investigation into the causes," White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre tweeted. According to FlightAware, a flight tracking company, more than 9,500 flights within, into or out of the US were delayed and more than 1,300 were cancelled due to the system failure. The number of cancellations and delays has continued to climb despite the agency lifting a ground stop.

US President Joe Biden was briefed on the outage and spoke with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on Wednesday morning. "They don't know what the cause is," ANI quoted Biden as telling reporters, adding, "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."

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg claimed that she has directed an after action process to determine exactly the root causes and recommended the next steps. "The FAA and DOT will continue to be transparent here about the causes of the issue and how we will ensure a system outage of this magnitude does not happen again," Jean-Pierre said.

"Our number one focus is to make sure that the safety of Americans who are flying. We want to make sure that they're safe. And the second part of this is to make sure that this does not happen again. And so, again, there's going to be an after action process and we'll move from there," she said.

The FAA, she said, is working aggressively to get to the bottom of the root causes of what happened with the system outage today and making sure that it doesn't happen again.

"Clearly, the safety of Americans who are flying every day is a number one priority and what they're going to do is to make sure that this doesn't happen again," the press secretary said.

With inputs from agencies