Things have not been going well for air travel lately.

Over the Christmas/New Year holiday, many flights ran into issues that prompted delays and cancellations.

Nasty winter storms served as the culprit for some of these issues. Meanwhile, Southwest Airlines faced serious troubles that extended well beyond just the weather at various destinations.

Not even one full month later, another major air travel catastrophe has emerged. This time, the disaster deals with technical problems experienced by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

What happened?

On Wednesday morning, nationwide US flights endured groundings on the orders of the FAA. The travel agency reported complications with Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) functions.

NOTAM is critical for air travel. These functions are what inform air travel workers, especially pilots, about critical aviation matters, domestic airport affairs, etc.

Later in the morning, the FAA finally gave the all-clear, lifting its grounding orders across the country. However, thousands of flights still suffered delays and cancellations, due to the NOTAM problems.

The FAA subsequently revealed that an "overnight outage" prompted the NOTAM troubles on Wednesday morning. Additional updates from the agency informed the public that the root cause of the aforementioned outage remains under investigation.

A negative domino effect

As one might imagine, nationwide flight groundings are serious business. They have ripple effects, especially for travelers on time-sensitive schedules and/or with connecting flights to catch.

Because of Wednesday morning's chaos, air travel reports on Wednesday night revealed over 10,100 US flights suffered delays, whereas over 1,300 were cancelled altogether.

The White House released a statement on this matter. According to the administration, the president remains in contact with the US Transportation Secretary.

The FAA has discovered a bad file believed to have caused NOTAM problems. However, the particulars surrounding this file and who bears responsibility for it have yet to be released.

Further comments from the White House allege that air travel issues from Wednesday were not caused by a cyberattack as some have speculated.

At this rate, many travelers are bracing themselves for the next aviation disaster to emerge. Despite claims from the Transportation Department, it looks as though US air travel has a way to go before it's out of the woods.