Some Hawaii flights were among thousands across the U.S. that were canceled or delayed Wednesday after a system that offers safety information to pilots failed, and the government launched an investigation into the breakdown, which grounded some planes for hours.

The Federal Aviation Administration said preliminary indications “traced the outage to a damaged database file.” The agency said it would take steps to avoid another similar disruption.

The breakdown showed how much American air travel depends on the computer system that generates alerts called NOTAMs, or Notice to Air Missions.

Before a plane takes off, pilots and airline dispatchers must review the notices, which include details about bad weather, runway closures or other temporary factors that could affect the flight. The system was once telephone-based but moved online years ago.

The system broke down late Tuesday and was not fixed until midmorning Wednesday. The FAA took the rare step of preventing any planes from taking off for a time, and the cascading chaos led to more than 1,300 flight cancellations and more than 10,000 delays by late afternoon, according to flight-tracking website FlightAware.

Disruptions were great enough that the Hawaii Tourism Authority and the Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau both issued notices to travelers advising them to contact their airlines for the latest flight information before heading to the airport.

FlightAware reported the following disruptions in Hawaii:

>> Daniel K. Inouye International Airport, the largest airport in the state, had 11 cancellations and 95 delays.

>> Nine cancellations were reported at the Kahului Airport and 54 delays.

>> Ellison Onizuka Kona International Airport at Keahole had four cancellations and 23 delays.

>> There were six delays at Hilo International Airport and no cancellations.

>> Lihue Airport had one cancellation and 19 delays.

>> Lanai didn’t have any delays or cancellations.

>> There were nine delays and no cancellations on Molokai.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told a news conference that the problems “led to a ground stop because of the way safety information was moving through the system.”

After the failures were fixed, he warned that travelers could continue to see some effects “rippling through the system.”

It was the latest headache for travelers in the U.S., who faced an even larger number of daily flight cancellations over the Christmas holiday due to a severe winter storm and a breakdown in crew- scheduling technology at Southwest Airlines.

Keith Vieira, principal of KV & Associates, Hospitality Consulting, said Tuesday that Hawaii hotel reservation departments were getting lots of calls, mostly from visitors inquiring about arriving late.

“A lot of calls, a lot of concern,” Vieira said.

Jerry Gibson, president of the Hawaii Hotel Alliance, said the Marriott Waikiki had a couple of visitors ask to extend their hotel stays after their flights got canceled.

Vieira said it is too soon to tell if the latest round of massive delays and cancellations further slows the pace of forward bookings, which were already soft with projections for the first and second quarter behind pace for what hotels previously had expected.

“People aren’t going to plan big winter trips if there is uncertainty,” he said.

He said travel disruptions downgrade traveler sentiment. His niece was supposed to leave at noon, but her flight got delayed and the new connection comes with a five- or six-hour layover, and now she has lost another day at work.

He said his friends, who live in Lake Tahoe, preemptively canceled a flight to San Francisco, and decided to drive instead.

“They said flying is too risky,” he said.

Gibson was more optimistic that the impact of this latest airline breakdown wouldn’t linger.

“There was a lot of chatter about the earlier Southwest cancellations, but people are still coming.”

Still, he said, “The first quarter is still tough. It’s very soft.”

Long-haul travel to Hawaii, in general, is down, he said.

“The first quarter is more or less what we are getting out of California,” Gibson said.

———

The Associated Press contributed to this report.