The recovery follows a 4.5 hour nationwide ground stop on Friday afternoon that led to more than 16,000 flight cancellations across Friday and Saturday, with Delta Air Lines, United Airlines and American Airlines scrubbing 15% to 20% of their Saturday schedules and JetBlue Airways cutting 40%. Duffy tied the failure to routine maintenance by FAA contractor L3Harris to switch old copper telecommunications wire to fiber at a remote facility, saying a faulty router or installation error flooded other routers in the 1980s analog network and overwhelmed the legacy system.

Bedford said investigators have identified and isolated the fault and found “zero evidence of anything nefarious and zero evidence of anything AI-related,” pushing back on speculation linking the disruption to the agency’s rollout three days earlier of Air Space Intelligence’s $875 million SMART routing tool across all 22 regional control centers. Duffy called on Congress to approve $50 billion in emergency funding to replace the aging infrastructure, while Bedford noted the FAA is working with AT&T, Verizon and Lumen on a new telecommunications architecture.