TEHRAN — The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration grounded every departing flight in the country on Friday, and the public’s first explanation fit in a single phrase: a “temporary telecommunications outage.” The order began at 3:54 p.m. Eastern Time and lasted until 8:15 p.m. It left thousands of flights canceled and a government that has spent months promising a modernized air traffic system, explaining why its old one failed everywhere at once.
The FAA said trouble had hit the Air Route Traffic Control Centers, the facilities that steer planes between airports.
By evening, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy supplied detail. Switches and routers, he said, “got overloaded with data” and began returning inconsistent information.
He corrected himself mid-sentence: “I shouldn’t say they went down.” Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin described new technology “overwhelming the older system,” while Duffy stressed that none of the new equipment failed.
“We have old switches, old routers,” he said. “We use 1980s little copper lines.”
Questions the briefing left open
Those accounts do not line up neatly. Mullin said nothing points to a cyberattack and that the failure looked mechanical, then added that officials were “still looking.”
Duffy said he did not want to rule out what he called “nefarious activity.” Neither explained why backups did not contain the problem, which matters because, as aviation law professor Ron Bartsch told Al Jazeera, the whole industry is built on redundancy.
Washington has a record of tidy first drafts. After the January 2023 outage of the pilot notification system, the FAA first pointed to a damaged file, then blamed contractors who deleted files by mistake.
Nothing said Friday has been independently verified. The Washington Post cited a person briefed on the matter describing a messier picture: the network’s timing system faltered, and alerts jumped from a typical 8,000 to 16,000.
A warning already on file
The surprise is hard to square with the paper trail. A Government Accountability Office report in September flagged copper cables dating to the 1960s and said the FAA was pushing through changes without scheduling them properly, so switchovers overlapped and strained the network.
Tony Stanton, a former senior executive at Australia’s aviation safety regulator, found it “incredibly surprising” that officials had not anticipated an outage.
Democrats raised a separate objection in October, asking the agency to pause its $875 million AI advisory tool until safety testing and oversight were explained. Its maker, ASI, denies any role, and officials have not linked it to Friday’s failure.
The bill and the passengers
That night Duffy asked Congress for $50 billion in emergency money, on top of the $12.5 billion lawmakers already provided. “I can’t build things if I don’t have money,” he said.
The request reportedly covers a common automation platform, controller workstations, cloud computing and a sturdier telecommunications backbone. Whether more money fixes a problem that new equipment appears to have helped cause is a question he left alone.
Travelers absorbed the cost first. Cirium counted at least 827 diversions, 670 of them back to the departure airport.
FlightAware tallied 9,132 cancellations for Friday and, by Saturday, more than 12,500 across two days. At Dallas/Fort Worth, a pilot asked why departures had stopped.
The controller said nobody knew, only that it was indefinite and nationwide. Duffy gave college football charters priority and promised normal operations by Thanksgiving, but would not rule out a repeat.
By most counts, it was only the third nationwide ground stop in U.S. history, after the September 11 attacks and the 2023 notification failure.
The second was a deleted file. This one, by the administration’s own account, was an old network meeting new equipment it could not handle.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: tehrantimes.com
