This morning, all flights in the US were grounded because of a problem with the Federal Aviation Administration’s computer systems.

All outbound flights were ground until 9am Eastern Time (23:00 GMT). The Federal Aviation Administration was working to restore the Notice to Air Missions system. This alerts pilots to potential dangers along a flight route.

According to FlightAware.com flight tracker, 4,948 flights within the US, or into, or out of the US, were delayed as of 3pm GMT, while 868 were cancelled. The East Coast was the most affected by delays.

The FAA stated that normal air traffic operations have resumed slowly across the US after an overnight disruption to the Notice to Air Missions (which provides safety information to flight crews) system.

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“The ground stop was lifted. We will continue to investigate the root cause of the problem.”

It stated earlier that “final validation checks” were being performed and that the system was reloaded after “operations throughout the National Airspace System were affected”.

The US aviation industry is in a ‘great mess’

Sky News correspondent Mark Stone was at Ronald Reagan Airport, Virginia. He said that it was a terrible situation for the United States’ aviation industry.

“We were informed that the NOTAM system, which is part the air traffic control system, had failed as of this morning. This is crucial for safe flight. As a result, the most crowded airspace in the world, that over the United States, didn’t open as it should.

“Looking at flight tracker websites, it was clear that flights were clustered around several cities in the United States with no take-offs.” As you might imagine, chaos for passengers.

There is no evidence of cyberattack

According to Karine Jean-Pierre, Joe Biden’s press secretary, the president of the United States has been informed about the outage.

She stated that there was no evidence of a cyberattack being behind the glitch. “But the president directed [the US Department of Transport] for a thorough investigation into the causes.”

Reporters were earlier told by Mr Biden that aircraft can still land safely. However, they cannot take off right now. Although they don’t know the exact cause, they anticipate that they will be able to identify it within a few hours and can respond accordingly.

The president said that he spoke to Pete Buttigieg, Transportation Secretary, over the phone and asked him to “report directly to me when they find it out”.

Many people tweeted that they were stranded because of the outage. One passenger at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport stated that no flights to the USA were available.

According to Cirium, an aviation analytics firm Cirium, 21,464 flights are scheduled to depart US airports today.

These departures offer nearly 2.9 million seats.