Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy explains what caused FAA nationwide ground stop: ‘Contractor error or faulty equipment’

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy on Saturday suggested that an FAA contractor might be to blame for Friday’s telecommunications outage, as per his remarks at a press briefing at Transportation Department headquarters. The outage grounded flights across the country and led to thousands of cancellations.Sean Duffy says contractor error or a faulty router may have caused Friday's nationwide FAA ground stop. (Bloomberg)According to Duffy, “in at least one of our remote FAA locations, a contractor was doing routine maintenance to switch telecommunication lines from old copper wire, and they were bringing it over to fiber.”L3Harris named, but fault not yet foundDuffy named the contractor as L3Harris. “That contractor that does the work for us is L3Harris. They’re our legacy provider,” he said. He added that officials are still trying to figure out what went wrong.Deep Dive“Was it user error or installation error from L3Harris, or did they install a faulty router? We haven’t determined what the fault was,” Duffy said, as per Huff Post. Also read: US flights grounded nationwide: A look back at the last major FAA shutdown in 2023How a router caused the ground stopDuffy explained what caused the FAA Nationwide Ground Stop on Friday. “Either through contractor error or a faulty piece of equipment, that router that was being replaced as we switched from copper to fiber, it started flooding other routers in our air traffic control system. So specifically, we had over 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds. And what that did was give us issues with communication with airplanes, and it also caused some disruption with radar feeds.”He said the airspace was shut down for safety. “When we see that, your safety is paramount. We shut down the airspace and we do it safely. We get you on the ground and then we work on isolating the problem and then opening the airspace back up, which is what we did yesterday.”Also read: FAA employee explains possible cause of nationwide ground stop on flights: ‘Wouldn’t rule out cyberattack’No cyberattack, says DuffyDuffy also dismissed speculation that the outage was a cyberattack. “Once we were able to isolate the work that was being done at this remote location, all of our systems came back online,” he said. “So we don’t believe this was cyber at all.”He added, “This was an FAA system that didn’t meet the moment. A contractor didn’t meet the moment, or the equipment didn’t meet the moment and caused the outages.”