US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy reported that a nationwide flight ground stop resulted from routine maintenance when contractor L3Harris upgraded copper wire to fiber optic cable.
A subsequent network router overload impacted a core communication system, prompting an FAA investigation into potential installation errors and hardware faults.
The outage, which led to the cancellation of more than 8.200 flights on Friday night, was caused by maintenance work being carried out by L3Harris, a long-time partner of the Federal Aviation Administration. While replacing copper cables with fiber optics at a remote location, a router overloaded a critical communications system.
The service noticed instability in the network and identified two points that were sending an excessively high number of connection requests, reaching a thousand requests every four to five seconds. The service immediately disabled these points to stabilize the network and began an investigation into the exact cause of the problem.
Officials are investigating whether the problem was caused by human error during installation by the company or faulty equipment. The Transportation Secretary defended the choice to carry out such work during the day instead of late at night, but noted that there will be a review of when such work is carried out. At the same time, he stressed threateningly that Congress must provide more money to upgrade aviation equipment.
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This was only the third time in the 21st century that a nationwide flight shutdown had occurred. Government officials, including the head of the agency and the Secretary of Homeland Security, have categorically ruled out any malicious activity or any connection to artificial intelligence, although the outage occurred just a day after the agency announced the use of a new artificial intelligence tool for air traffic controllers.
The effects continued the next day, with at least 3.000 additional flight cancellations on Saturday, after the suspension of flights had already been lifted.
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