US authorities are investigating if a faulty router caused a massive air traffic system outage that grounded flights nationwide. While systems are recovering, thousands of flights remain cancelled as officials work to resume normal operations.
US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Saturday (local time) that investigators are probing whether contractor “incompetence” or a faulty router triggered the massive air traffic control system outage that forced a rare nationwide ground stop on Friday, even as flight disruptions persisted into the weekend while Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Administrator Bryan Bedford assured travellers that “the worst is behind us.”
Speaking at a Department of Transportation news conference, Duffy ruled out a cyberattack as the cause of the four-hour ground stop, explaining that the failure occurred during a network upgrade from copper to fibre wiring when a router being replaced began flooding other routers across the system.