US flights grounded: Stranded passengers flood Twitter with complaints

US flights grounded: Passengers complained about last-minute cancellation of flights. (Representational image)

As flights across the United States were delayed due to a glitch in the computer-based system of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), passengers took to social media to report last-minute cancellation of their flights.

"Anyone one else stranded? Our @united says there is a nation wide outage of FAA
@FAANews computer systems," mathematician DJ Patil, served as the Chief Data Scientist of the US, tweeted.

"Last time they had to do this I was when Oklahoma system flooded."

Uh oh. The claim is the FAA @FAANews is now going to do a hard reset of their systems. Last time they had to do this I was when Oklahoma system flooded.

— dj patil (@dpatil) January 11, 2023

"@AmericanAir informed us that all flights flying to the USA are grounded until the FAA system is fixed.
@FAANews, any updates? Currently in Paris, Thanks," Phileas Hocquard tweeted.

@AmericanAir informed us that all flights flying to the USA are grounded until the FAA system is fixed. @FAANews, any updates? Currently in Paris, Thanks.

— Phileas Hocquard (@PhileasHoc) January 11, 2023

Another passenger at the Los Angeles International Airport said her American Airlines flight crew informed passengers that no flights were taking off from there.

our @AmericanAir crew says no one is taking off from @flyLAXairport currently due to this outage. Delayed for 90 mins already.

— Amanda Brooks (@BrooksAD) January 11, 2023

Just rebooked for morning because I would miss my connect in Dulles. Friend who was booked 25 mins later than me on @JetBlue got out, but we didn’t.

— Dan Budwick (@DanBudwick) January 11, 2023

At around 6:30 Eastern Time, there were 760 delays within, into or out of the United, according to the flight tracking website FlightAware.

The FAA said it was working towards restoring its Notice to Air Missions System (NOTAM). "We are performing final validation checks and repopulating the system now. Operations across the National Airspace System are affected," it tweeted.

The agency said that it would provide frequent updates as it made progress.

The grounding of flights comes weeks after the United States witnessed massive disruptions in flights due to the fierce winter, affecting lakhs of people.