A telecommunications failure caused delays across the nation on Thursday, which left airlines and controllers to manually enter information about each aircraft’s flight plan. The communication system crashed at around 5:10am, but is now back up and running, and is fully operational says the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

The failure also cut off the communication that operates between a vast majority of FAA computers that co-ordinate flight delays and to minimise the time that Jets must wait, said FAA spokeswoman Diane Spitaliere.

According to another FAA spokesman, the failure was due to adverse weather conditions in the nation’s north west, as well as a “software configuration problem,” but there is no suspicion of a ‘cyber attack.’The control centres were fixed a few hours later at around 9am, before huge traffic got in the way, then there could have been slight issues.

The FAA did not know how many delays it had caused in total, but warnings from Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. said that something must be done to prevent something like this from happening again.

Source: USA Today