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TEHRAN \u2014 The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration grounded every departing flight in the country on Friday, and the public\u2019s first explanation fit in a single phrase: a \u201ctemporary telecommunications outage.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
The FAA said trouble had hit the Air Route Traffic Control Centers, the facilities that steer planes between airports.<\/p>\n
By evening, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy supplied detail. Switches and routers, he said, \u201cgot overloaded with data\u201d and began returning inconsistent information.<\/p>\n
He corrected himself mid-sentence: \u201cI shouldn\u2019t say they went down.\u201d Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin described new technology \u201coverwhelming the older system,\u201d while Duffy stressed that none of the new equipment failed.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have old switches, old routers,\u201d he said. \u201cWe use 1980s little copper lines.\u201d<\/p>\n
Questions the briefing left open<\/strong><\/p>\n 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 \u201cstill looking.\u201d<\/p>\n Duffy said he did not want to rule out what he called \u201cnefarious activity.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Nothing said Friday has been independently verified. The Washington Post cited a person briefed on the matter describing a messier picture: the network\u2019s timing system faltered, and alerts jumped from a typical 8,000 to 16,000.<\/p>\n A warning already on file<\/strong><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Tony Stanton, a former senior executive at Australia\u2019s aviation safety regulator, found it \u201cincredibly surprising\u201d that officials had not anticipated an outage.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s failure.<\/p>\n The bill and the passengers<\/strong><\/p>\n That night Duffy asked Congress for $50 billion in emergency money, on top of the $12.5 billion lawmakers already provided. \u201cI can\u2019t build things if I don\u2019t have money,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Travelers absorbed the cost first. Cirium counted at least 827 diversions, 670 of them back to the departure airport.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The second was a deleted file. This one, by the administration\u2019s own account, was an old network meeting new equipment it could not handle.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n