It caused relatively minor inconvenience, but a Federal Aviation Administration computer outage last week should prompt plenty of questions and scrutiny.

In the early morning hours, the Notice to Air Missions system went down, grounding flights across the country. Thousands of flights were affected — nationally and internationally.

Notice to Air Missions is how pilots and other essential personnel find out about any number of issues. The system is integral to safety, and the fact it went dark is concerning.

Now all that is left is figuring out how in the world such an essential system could strand thousands of flights. It also begs the question: Just how vulnerable are we to cyberattacks if something internal can create this problem?

Federal investigators must not leave any stone unturned in figuring out not only how this outage happened in the first place, but how to prevent it from ever happening again.