Airlines expect U.S. operations to rebound on Thursday as FAA investigates outage

Passengers wait for the resumption of flights at O’Hare International Airport after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had ordered airlines to pause all domestic departures due to a system outage, in Chicago, Illinois, U.S., January 11, 2023. REUTERS/Jim Vondruska

WASHINGTON/CHICAGO (Reuters) - U.S. airlines said they expect operations to return to normal on Thursday as the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) scrambles to pinpoint the cause of a computer outage that grounded flights nationally and to prevent it from happening again.

More than 11,300 U.S. flights were delayed or cancelled on Wednesday, according to FlightAware, in the first national grounding of domestic traffic in about two decades.