WASHINGTON — A faulty router put in during maintenance work that was switching a remote air traffic control site from copper lines to fiber may have caused Friday’s nationwide ground stop, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Saturday, according to Reuters.
Duffy, speaking at a Saturday news conference at Transportation Department headquarters, said the contractor L3Harris was doing routine maintenance at a remote Federal Aviation Administration location, converting a connection from copper wire to fiber because the old copper service was being discontinued. As the switch was made, one router began flooding the rest of the network, making more than 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds and overloading other communications centers.
The trouble started at 3:36 p.m. Eastern on Friday, when air traffic control centers began seeing instability in radar and communications systems. The FAA halted departures nationwide shortly before 4 p.m., and the stop stayed in place until 8:15 p.m., when Duffy announced the airspace had reopened.
What exactly failed is still not settled. “We’re working to determine was whether we had incompetence, meaning was it user error or installer error from L3Harris, or did they install a faulty router? We haven’t determined what the fault was,” Duffy said at the press conference.
No Sign of Anything Nefarious, FAA Chief Says
FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford, who appeared alongside Duffy, said there was no evidence of anything nefarious or anything related to artificial intelligence behind the outage. He apologized to travelers and defended the decision to halt departures while technicians worked to pin down the instability.
Thousands More Flights Canceled Saturday
The recovery, meanwhile, is still costing passengers their trips. Airlines canceled more than 4,000 flights on Saturday and delayed more than 3,000 others, on top of the nearly 10,000 cancellations on Friday, in what Reuters described as the longest nationwide shutdown of flights since the September 11, 2001, attacks.
Bedford said between 4,000 and 5,000 cancellations were expected on Saturday as airlines moved aircraft, pilots and flight attendants back into position, and that carriers expected to restore their full schedules by the close of business on Sunday.
Duffy said the routers in the facilities were manufactured in 2001, that the copper lines being replaced were so old the service was being discontinued, and that L3Harris has run the network for more than two decades. L3Harris did not respond to a request for comment.
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