FAA glitch causes widespread delays

A problem with the FAA system that collects airlines' flight plans caused widespread flight cancellations and delays nationwide Thursday. It was the second time in 15 months that a glitch in the flight plan system caused delays.

The outage is affecting mostly flight plans but also traffic management, such as ground stops and ground delays, he said.

I guess these things happen. Usually critical systems like these have some pretty serious redundancy architectures. Sure, performing upgrades can be problematic, but redundancy can be used to quickly declare 'no go' when things start to go wrong. It is perplexing how such an important piece of infrastructure could be so vulnerable.

FBI Suspects Terrorists Are Exploring Cyber Attacks

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking at people with suspected links to al Qaeda who have shown an interest in mounting an attack on computer systems that control critical U.S. infrastructure, a senior official told Congress Tuesday.

Such infrastructure could include power grids and transportation systems.

I am not saying today's events are an attack, but perhaps someone poking around, seeing what's what, and oops?

I will be very interested to hear the explanation for this one. The explanation for the last one?

The FAA said at that time the source of the computer software malfunction was a "packet switch" that "failed due to a database mismatch."

Ok, right....whatever.