After a major telecommunications glitch grounded all flights across the United States on Friday, investigators traced the problem to one faulty router in Arkansas.
The Wall Street Journal reported late on Saturday that a router at the Federal Aviation Administration radio site in El Dorado, Arkansas, caused Friday’s major outage, which left travelers stranded at airports coast to coast.
Rebecca Guy, the FAA’s technology chief, explained during a Saturday press conference that the initial investigation had flagged two sites as potential problems: one in Arkansas and a radar site in Amarillo, Texas.
“We saw two places that were actually pinging our network at a very high rate, a thousand connections over every four to five seconds,” she said — and that had ultimately overloaded the system.
The resulting system overload halted departures nationwide while about 3,500 aircraft were in the air — all of which landed safely — and left thousands of passengers stranded at airports all around the country.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy joined CNN anchor Dana Bash on Sunday to discuss the fallout, saying that at the end of the day, as the secretary of transportation, he could only take responsibility for what this administration had done and was doing. He added that the overall system needed upgrades — such as the router that had caused the problem, which he said had been obsolete for nearly two decades — and that it was his job to make sure those upgrades happened.
“As the secretary, do you take responsibility for what happened?” Bash asked.
“When we do work and things go wrong, of course, I’m the secretary,” he said. “But I also have to acknowledge what was delivered to me. I have systems that are from the 90s. I have radar from the 60s and 70s. I gotta tell you what I have — I take responsibility for what was given to me by prior administrations, and now I tell you how I’m going to fix it.”
He went on to explain that the overall network had to be restructured and updated in order for things to run more smoothly. The FAA bought the router in question in 2001, he said, but it was obsolete by 2006 — and the agency was still using it 20 years later.
Making several other appearances across the Sunday morning talk shows, Duffy also confirmed that air travel schedules were rapidly returning to normal.
President Donald Trump confirmed that overhauling the system was a priority, posting Sunday morning on Truth Social and calling on Congress to approve funding to do just that.
“If Congress approves the desperately needed money for Air Traffic Control, we can get it built quickly and efficiently. It will be the BEST SYSTEM anywhere in the World. Much of our current air control system is 50 years old — RIDICULOUS! We have already started the work, but it should be done all at once, not in drips and drabs. Congress must approve. The Biden Administration set it back years!” he posted.
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