Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said a contractor with L3Harris, an American tech company, is responsible for the outage that caused the Federal Aviation Administration to ground all flights nationwide Friday.
The grounding was the first of its kind since Sept. 11, 2001.
Mr. Duffy said the contractor was performing routine maintenance to switch outdated copper telecom lines over to fiber.
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“What we’re working to determine was whether we had incompetence, meaning was it user error … from L3 Harris, or did they install a faulty router?” Mr. Duffy said Saturday at a press briefing.
Mr. Duffy said the system became overwhelmed when the replacement router began flooding other routers across the FAA network, with thousands of connection attempts.
The secretary added that this interfered with the FAA’s ability to reach planes and disrupted radar feeds.
FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said there was no evidence of a cyberattack and “zero evidence of anything AI-related.”
Mr. Duffy said President Trump was in communication with the FAA on Friday night while telling the transportation chief to “do it fast. Do it right.”
Mr. Bedford on Saturday said he expected as many as 5,000 flights to be canceled out of the 41,000 scheduled for the day. As of 1 p.m. Eastern time, 14,600 flights have been delayed, according to Fox News.
“That will set us up for full recovery tomorrow. And based on everything that we’re hearing from our airline partners, they believe that they’ll be able to have full schedule integrity by the close of business on Sunday,” Mr. Bedford said. “I do think the worst is behind us, but we still do have a significant amount of recovery work to do.”
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