US aviation disruptions spilled into Sunday with more than 16,000 flights canceled across Friday and Saturday, as the Federal Aviation Administration said investigators have not yet identified what triggered Friday’s four-hour nationwide ground stop. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy linked the outage to routine maintenance by contractor L3Harris to switch copper telecommunications lines to fiber at a remote facility, saying officials are examining “whether we had incompetence, meaning was it user error or installation error from L3Harris, or did they install a faulty router?”
FAA acting Chief Technology Officer Rebecca Guy said the agency detected two locations pinging its network at 1,000 connections every four to five seconds when the instability began, while a senior government source told CBS News the agency isolated a two-decade-old router type that became overwhelmed. L3Harris, which connects more than 4,400 FAA sites and has operated the agency’s telecommunications backbone since 2002, said it “takes the nationwide ground stop and its impact on travelers, airlines and air traffic operations seriously.” Former Transportation Department Inspector General Mary Schiavo told NPR a nearly identical failure involving the same contractor occurred in November 2009, when a misconfigured router blocked 75% of network traffic.
