On the evening of January 10th, the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA’s) Notice To Air Missions (NOTAM) system failed for the first time in history. Critical for relaying essential information to flights, a nationwide ground stop on domestic flights was implemented, causing disruption to millions of passengers. Interestingly, Canada’s aviation system was hit with its own computer outage the day after the FAA's crisis, but hours after the massive ground stop was issued. While the assumption is that these two extremely rare occurrences are connected in some way, Canadian officials believe that the cause of the outages is not related.

What happened in Canada?

Also taking place on Wednesday, January 11th, Canada's own Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system experienced a disruption. Operated by NAV Canada, this system outage occurred sometime during the morning, preventing the air navigation service provider from sending new updates to airlines. Taking to Twitter at 17:38 UTC on January 11th, NAV Canada issued the following statement:

"NAV CANADA's Canadian NOTAM entry system is currently experiencing an outage affecting newly issued NOTAMs, and we are working to restore function. We are not currently experiencing any delays related to this outage. We are assessing impacts to our operations and will provide updates as soon as they are available."

According to CBC News, NAV Canada also stated that no flights were delayed as a result, and that the system came back online in the early afternoon. More specifically, at 19:17 UTC, the agency issued a statement on Twitter noting that its system had been restored.

While the FAA and NAV Canada both experienced failures of their NOTAM systems, it would appear that the FAA's outage caused more disruption to Canadian flights than the NAV Canada outage. Indeed, while NAV Canada reported no delays resulting from its outage, airlines like Air Canada and WestJet confirmed disruptions to their transborder services (flights between the US and Canada). While Air Canada said that it could not determine the extent of the impact, WestJet told Global News that six of its flights faced delays as a result of the FAA outage.

Software vs. hardware

So what was the cause of NAV Canada's NOTAM system failure? Well, unlike the FAA's outage, which was reportedly caused by "a damaged database file," NAV Canada says that it believes its outage was the result of a computer hardware failure. Just like the FAA, NAV Canada explicitly stated that their issue was not the result of a cyberattack.

The timing of the incidents on both sides of the border is incredibly bizarre - and something that most would have trouble believing was 'unrelated.' However, this does seem to be the case. Perhaps sheer coincidence is just slightly more believable when considering that NAV Canada had another outage in the past year. In fact, in July 2022, one of its telecommunications service providers experienced an outage, which impacted its operations in Western Canada. This resulted in the delay of some arrivals and departures at Canadian airports.

Hopefully, all of these incidents serve as wake-up calls to test, inspect, modernize, and back-up data and equipment to prevent any similar outages from happening again.