An overlooked software flaw is opening up U.S. aviation authorities to new scrutiny over the resiliency of the systems that keep the nation’s planes moving.
Federal Aviation Administration officials were still working late Wednesday to determine what went wrong in an outage that prompted a nationwide flight stoppage. The agency said preliminary findings traced the cause to a "damaged database file” and there’s no evidence of a cyberattack.
The system breakdown immediately attracted criticism from prominent lawmakers and aviation industry leaders, just weeks after Southwest Airlines was called out by authorities for its own technology failures.