WASHINGTON — US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced Saturday that investigators are zeroing in on a faulty piece of equipment or contractor error as the root cause of the massive air traffic control system outage that triggered an unprecedented nationwide ground stop.
The catastrophic communications failure on Friday forced the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to halt all departing flights nationwide for over four hours, resulting in the longest nationwide aviation shutdown since September 11, 2001.
Investigating “Incompetence or Faulty Equipment”
Speaking at a Department of Transportation briefing, Duffy explicitly ruled out a cyberattack or artificial intelligence anomalies. Instead, he explained that the breakdown occurred during routine maintenance work transitioning an aging telecommunications grid from traditional copper wiring to modern fiber technology.
According to Duffy, a router being replaced by contractor L3Harris Technologies began malfunctioning, flooding other routers across the air traffic control network with excessive data traffic and destabilizing the system.
“What we’re working to determine was whether we had incompetence, meaning was it user error, installer error from L3Harris, or did they install a faulty router?” Duffy told reporters. “Either through contractor error or a faulty piece of equipment, that router… started flooding other routers in our air traffic control system.”
Officials noted that out of roughly 50,000 flights scheduled nationwide on Friday, only about 30,000 were able to take off before the ground stop order went into effect.
Lingering Disruption and Cancellations
While the FAA lifted the ground stop on Friday evening and declared that “the worst is behind us”, the ripple effects have heavily impacted travel schedules across the weekend.
- Yesterday (Friday): The sudden shutdown and subsequent backlog grounded thousands of flights, stranding passengers in terminals from New York to Los Angeles.
- Today (Saturday): Disjointed schedules and lingering aircraft displacement led to more than 2,000 flight cancellations across the United States, with officials estimating thousands more delays as airlines scramble to normalize operations by Sunday.
The incident has reignited intense political scrutiny over the country’s aging aviation infrastructure. Secretary Duffy used the crisis to press Congress for a $50 billion infrastructure investment to modernize the FAA’s legacy analog systems, warning that outdated tech remains deeply vulnerable to cascading glitches.
