The FAA ordered a nationwide ground stop on Friday, halting all departures from U.S. Airports for over four hours. The disruption affected nearly 10,000 flights and stranded more than 1 million travelers. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy cited outdated wiring and overloaded routers as the cause.
Duffy held a press conference to explain the outage, stating that the issue originated from a remote FAA facility. He described the problem as a result of routine maintenance replacing old copper wire with fiber optic lines. Officials confirmed that the cause was not a cyberattack or a major system failure.
The outdated communications network, which has been in use for decades, was found to have overloaded routers. This led to a complete shutdown of air traffic control systems. No evidence of a security breach was found, and the situation was ruled unrelated to the Microsoft outage.
The FAA’s ground stop was the first major disruption of its kind in recent years. It highlighted the vulnerability of aging infrastructure in critical systems. Officials are now reviewing the incident to prevent future outages. The incident has raised questions about the need for modernizing federal communication networks.
