January 12, 2023: -On Wednesday, Thousands of U.S. flights were delayed after the Federal Aviation Administration suffered an outage of the system sending messages to pilots.

The FAA said domestic departures would be paused on Wednesday until nearly 9 a.m. ET while the agency worked that restores the Notice to Air Missions System. The agency said all flights currently in the air were safe to land.

Over 4,000 U.S. flights were getting delayed as of 8:30 a.m. According to FlightAware, residual delays could stay hours from the backup until the ground stop is released.

By 8:15 a.m. The FAA said that flights were starting at Newark Liberty International Airport and Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.

“This technology issue is driving significant operational delays across the National Airspace System,” stated Airlines for America, an industry group representing major U.S. carriers, which also include Delta, American, United, Southwest and others.

The White House stated that Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg had stated President Joe Biden on the outage.

“There is no proof of a cyberattack at this point, but the President directed DOT conducting a complete investigation into the causes,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre tweeted.

The incident comes just weeks after lousy weather during the busy holiday travel prompted mass flight disruptions across the U.S. Days later, over 15,000 Southwest flights were cancelled after the carrier buckled from all the scheduled transfers.

On Wednesday, Southwest is preparing to cancel flights to avoid further disturbances, Casey Murray, president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, stated. Southwest didn’t immediately comment.

Shares of Southwest regarded 1% lower in premarket trading Wednesday. Shares of different major airlines were little changed.