Amtrak's booking experiences outages, glitches amid increased demand as passengers look for alternatives after FAA ground stop

Following a disastrous communication failure in air traffic control on November 13, the FAA enacted a nationwide ground stop that stranded over 4,700 flights, causing a ripple of cancellations and delays. Passengers flocked to Amtrak as an alternative, resulting in a major strain on their booking system. The fallout also hit customer support hard, leaving users grappling with account access problems.

The Federal Aviation Administration earlier issued a nationwide ground stop for all flights on Friday, November 13. The FAA attributed a communication outage at its regional air traffic controls as the reason behind the ground stop.

This marked only the third time the FAA has issued such a halt over "extraordinary circumstances" after one due to a computer malfunction in January 2023 and the first after the September 11, 2001 attacks. Following the issue, the agency had been probing the issue at 22 regional air traffic control centres, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy had revealed.

The nationwide ground stop was lifted by the FAA after more than four hours of outage. The agency said planes could resume departures

Over 4,700 flights were cancelled, while more than 10,000 were delayed on Friday, Reuters reported. Meanwhile another 700 flights have already been cancelled for Saturday, according to FlightRadar24. According to Reuters, citing aviation analysts, it may take multiple days for airlines to restore their flight schedules.

Passengers look for alternatives, Amtrak experiences glitches

As passengers scrambled to look for alternatives after their flights were either cancelled or delayed they looked towards intercity train Amtrak. The high demand caused the company's ticket booking system to experience an outage on Friday evening.

The national passenger railroad company said it was experiencing "high-than-normal call volumes" after the FAA's flight halt. The company responded to a user on X, saying "We're sorry to hear you are having issues accessing our website. Due to the current situation, we're experiencing high-than-normal volumes of traffic over our phones and web services." The firm further told the user to "try again after a few minutes". In another reply, the company said its system was undergoing an update.

Several passengers also reported pre-booked tickets missing from their accounts.

Amtrak has recommended commuters to contact them at 1-800-877-7245 for assistance and help with cancellations.

According to Fox35 Orlando, hundreds of users reported issues with the Amtrak website on DownDetector. The reporting began shortly before 5 pm on Friday, and another spike was recorded near 6 pm.

What caused the FAA outage?

Homeland Security Secretary, Markwayne Mullin said that the introduction of new technologies in the old air traffic control system overwhelmed it. He added that the old system requires a complete overhaul, which could cost nearly $50 billion.