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(CNN) — Officials are still trying to figure out exactly what led to the Federal Aviation Administration system outage on Wednesday but have traced it to a corrupt file, which was first reported by CNN.

In a statement late Wednesday, the FAA said it was continuing to investigate the outage and “take all needed steps to prevent this kind of disruption from happening again.”

“Our preliminary work has traced the outage to a damaged database file. At this time, there is no evidence of a cyberattack,” the FAA said.

The FAA is still trying to determine whether any one person or “routine entry” into the database is responsible for the corrupted file, a government official familiar with the investigation into the NOTAM system outage told CNN.

Another source familiar with the Federal Aviation Administration operation described exclusively to CNN on Wednesday how the outage played out.

When air traffic control officials realized they had a computer issue late Tuesday, they came up with a plan, the source said, to reboot the system when it would least disrupt air travel, early on Wednesday morning.

But ultimately that plan and the outage led to massive flight delays and an unprecedented order to stop all aircraft departures nationwide.

The computer system that failed was the central database for all NOTAMs (Notice to Air Missions) nationwide. Those notices advise pilots of issues along their route and at their destination. It has a backup, which officials switched to when problems with the main system emerged, according to the source.

FAA officials told reporters early Wednesday that the issues developed in the 3 p.m. ET hour on Tuesday.

Officials ultimately found a corrupt file in the main NOTAM system, the source told CNN. A corrupt file was also found in the backup system.

In the overnight hours of Tuesday into Wednesday, FAA officials decided to shut down and reboot the main NOTAM system — a significant decision, because the reboot can take about 90 minutes, according to the source.

They decided to perform the reboot early Wednesday, before air traffic began flying on the East Coast, to minimize disruption to flights.

“They thought they’d be ahead of the rush,” the source said.

During this early morning process, the FAA told reporters that the system was “beginning to come back online,” but said it would take time to resolve.

The system, according to the source, “did come back up, but it wasn’t completely pushing out the pertinent information that it needed for safe flight, and it appeared that it was taking longer to do that.”

That’s when the FAA issued a nationwide ground stop at around 7:30 a.m. ET, halting all domestic departures.

Aircraft in line for takeoff were held before entering runways. Flights already in the air were advised verbally of the safety notices by air traffic controllers, who keep a static electronic or paper record at their desks of the active notices.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg ordered an after-action review and also said there was “no direct evidence or indication” that the issue was a cyberattack.

The source said the NOTAM system is an example of aging infrastructure due for an overhaul.

“Because of budgetary concerns and flexibility of budget, this tech refresh has been pushed off,” the source said. “I assume now they’re going to actually find money to do it.”

“The FAA’s infrastructure is a lot more than just brick and mortar.”

Investment in the agency is set to be addressed this year by Congress when the five-year FAA Reauthorization Act signed in 2018 expires.

Top image: A traveler looks at a flight board listing delays and cancellations at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport on January 11. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

Fighting is still raging in Soledar, a salt mine town in eastern Ukraine, despite Russian claims that it has gained control of the region.

Should Russian troops indeed capture the town, it would mark Moscow’s first gain in the Donbas for months – potentially offering President Vladimir Putin some welcome news after a string of defeats on the battlefield since last summer.

The significance of Soledar in military terms is minimal. However, its capture would allow Russian forces, and especially the Wagner mercenary group, to turn their focus on nearby Bakhmut, which has been a target since the summer.

The town of Soledar in Donetsk has been a target for Russian forces since last May. With a pre-war population of about 10,000, it has little strategic value in itself, but is a waypoint in the Russians’ attritional slog westwards. Moscow has struggled for months to attack Bakhmut from the east, but were it to capture Soledar, Moscow would at least be able to approach the city from a different path.

The Russian armed forces have had nothing to celebrate since the beginning of July, and have had to retreat in both Kharkiv to the north and Kherson in southern Ukraine.

The capture of Soledar, despite its now-ruined state, would therefore be rare progress. But it would be symbolic rather than substantive. The Institute for the Study of War said control of Soledar “will not necessarily allow Russian forces to exert control over critical Ukrainian ground lines of communication into Bakhmut,” the larger prize.

But Soledar is of outsize significance to one man: oligarch and Wagner mercenary group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin. His Wagner fighters, many of them former prison inmates, have taken heavy casualties with one wave after another of ground assaults across what has become a battlefield of trenches and mud reminiscent of World War I. After months in which the Russian Ministry of Defense has delivered nothing but retreat, Prigozhin is keen to show that his men deliver.

Read more about Soledar here.

CNN
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Russian war crimes and human rights abuses during the war in Ukraine add up to a “litany of violations of international humanitarian law,” according to Human Rights Watch.

In the rights group’s annual report reviewing human rights standards in nearly 100 countries, it said that evidence of war crimes in Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, are part of a pattern that “has been repeated countless times.”

HRW’s World Report 2023 also highlights the bombing of a theater in Mariupol, despite signs warning that children were sheltering there, as well as strikes on other non-military targets.

“Inflicting civilian suffering, such as the repeated strikes on the energy infrastructure that Ukrainians depend on for electricity, water, and heat, seems to be a central part of the Kremlin’s strategy,” reads the report.

And while the authors praise the response of European countries in receiving Ukrainian refugees, they also say that “governments should reflect on where the situation would be if the international community had made a concerted effort to hold Putin to account much earlier – in 2014, at the onset of the war in eastern Ukraine; in 2015, for abuses in Syria; or for the escalating human rights crackdown within Russia over the last decade.”

Elsewhere, HRW highlights the armed conflict in the Tigray region in northern Ethiopia, which it notes doesn’t get anywhere near as much attention as Ukraine.

“Governments and the UN have condemned the summary killings, widespread sexual violence, and pillage, but have done little else” as an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Tigrayan population in Western Tigray resulted in many deaths, sexual violence, mass detention, and the forced displacement of thousands,” the report said.

The report also calls for more scrutiny of China after Xi Jinping secured a third term as Communist Party leader and president in October.

“Xi has surrounded himself with loyalists and doubled down on building a security state, deepening rights violations across the country,” the report said.

And as Western governments have grown increasingly uncomfortable with China’s policies, they have sought to deepen alliances with India. But HRW’s report said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party was deploying some of the same repressive practices as China.

“The seemingly careless trade-off on human rights that world leaders make, justified as the cost of doing business, ignores the longer-term implications of their compromises,” reads the report. “Deepening ties with the Modi government while avoiding its troubling rights record squanders valuable leverage to protect the precious, but increasingly endangered, civic space on which India’s democracy relies.”

Other cases highlighted by HRW include Hungary, where the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban has “continued its attacks on rule of law and democratic institutions,” declaring a state of danger over the war in Ukraine which allows it to rule by decree and avoid parliamentary scrutiny.

In addition, HRW noted that 2022 saw the UK government has introduced new laws that “violate rights and proposed significantly weakening human rights protections in domestic law.”

And the organization warned against the temptations of autocratic rule the world over.

“Autocrats benefit from the illusion they project as being indispensable to maintaining stability, which in turn seemingly justifies their oppression and widespread human-rights violations committed toward achieving that end,” reads the report.

The effort to cement this control “erodes” the pillars of a society based on the rule of law, the report added.

“The result is frequently massive corruption, a broken economy, and a hopelessly partisan judiciary,” it said. “Vital civic space is dismantled, with activists and independent journalists in jail, in hiding, or fearing retaliation.”

Hong Kong
CNN
 — 

At least five people were killed and 13 others injured when a car accelerated through pedestrians at an intersection in the southern Chinese hub of Guangzhou on Wednesday evening, state media said.

Videos circulating on social media and geolocated by CNN appeared to show the vehicle, a black SUV, plowing through pedestrians on two separate crossings in the four-way intersection in a busy, upmarket commercial district of the city of 19 million.

Another video, circulating online and cited by state media, appears to show the driver throwing handfuls of cash out of his vehicle after pulling to the side of the road.

Local authorities said police had “controlled” the driver, a 22-year-old man from Guangdong province, and further investigation was underway.

The incident occurred during rush hour at 5:25 p.m., when many scooters, cars and pedestrians could be seen on the road.

Police and medical staff were immediately dispatched, according to local authorities, which also confirmed the casualty numbers.

An eyewitness cited in a report from state-run China News Service said the vehicle plowed through pedestrians at the junction without stopping afterward.

While the incident was reported by China’s official media, it was not among trending topics on the country’s heavily controlled social media platform Weibo on Thursday morning.