FAA grounds flights due to faulty router during copper wire switch
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy explained that a faulty router caused a nationwide flight grounding in the United States on Friday while contractors switched from copper wiring to fiber optics.
Nationwide flights halted for hours
The Federal Aviation Administration grounded all flights across the country for approximately four hours on Friday. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy held a press conference in Washington, D.C., on Saturday to address the incident. He stated that an FAA system failed to meet current operational requirements during this period. The outage affected potentially millions of travelers and represented the longest grounding since September 11.
Contractor replaced old copper lines
Defense and infrastructure company L3Harris was performing routine maintenance to move telecommunication lines from old copper wire to fiber. This work took place in at least one remote FAA location where the contractor owns the network. The switch involved changing from Time-Division Multiplexing to IP or analog to digital systems. When a router was swapped out, it overwhelmed neighboring devices by sending more than 1,000 connection requests every four to five seconds.
Officials rule out cyberattack
Secretary Duffy stated that the government does not believe a foreign nation attacked this network. The fault likely stemmed from either contractor error or a faulty piece of equipment during the upgrade. L3Harris is now modernizing the communications infrastructure supporting the National Airspace System according to their spokesperson. No evidence suggests the grounding was related to the simultaneous switch to an AI-based air traffic control system.
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