Federal officials say flights were delayed across the country when a piece of communications equipment in Salt Lake City failed.

Federal Aviation Administration officials and an official for the union that represents the agency's technicians said Thursday the failure prevented air traffic control computers in different regions of the country from talking to each other.

Two large computer centers in Salt Lake City and near Atlanta were affected, as well as 21 regional radar centers around the country.

The problem began with the failure of a single circuit board inside a router, a piece of communications equipment that enables computers to network to each other.

The FAA says the problem has been fixed, but this was the second time in 15 months a glitch in its flight plan system has triggered cancellations and
delays that affected flights across the nation.

Airline dispatchers were forced to send plans to air traffic controllers, who
have been entering them manually into the system.

The outage also affected traffic management, including ground stops and ground delays.

A software glitch at the Georgia facility in August of last year delayed hundred of flights across the country.

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