Federal Aviation Administration Data Breach (2009)

The failure of a single piece of computer gear in Utah disrupted travel for thousands Thursday, exposing the risks of the long-running patchwork upgrade of the nation's air-traffic-control system. The malfunction occurred in an FAA facility in Salt Lake City around 5 a.m. EST, when a card inside a router that processes flight plans and weather information started to fail. The router began feeding misinformation to controllers about planes' intended flight paths and, in some cases, what the weather was like.