The U.S. Secretary of Transportation, Sean Duffy, this Saturday pointed to the communications contractor of air traffic control, L3Harris, and a possible “defective router” as the main parties responsible for the air chaos that led to massive delays and the cancellation of more than 9,000 flights during Friday.
“We are working to clarify whether it was incompetence, in the sense of a user error... by L3Harris or whether they installed a defective router,” Duffy said during a media appearance.
As he detailed, the replacement device became saturated with data to other routers of the air traffic control network through thousands of connection attempts, which ended up causing the system to collapse. As a result, air controllers lost the ability to communicate with aircraft and to receive radar information.
The intervention took place within a routine maintenance operation at a remote facility of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), whose goal was to replace old copper lines, in service for decades, with modern fiber-optic connections.
Duffy has stressed that, at this time, the air traffic control communications are “fully operational,” although the normalization of service has not prevented this Saturday from already recording 4,363 additional flight cancellations.
In the same press conference, the FAA administrator, Bryan Bedford, also spoke, who explained that the equipment causing the failure was located and isolated approximately 45 minutes after the first anomalies in the network were detected.
“We received random reports from different facilities related to frequencies that were coming in and cutting out, so they were forced to switch between the primary and backup systems,” Bedford said. “If it had been a single source, we would have overcome it, but when we saw that there were two, three, ten, 17 sources, we started to realize that something much bigger was happening,” he added.
Upon finding that the incident could not be resolved quickly, the authorities decided to order “we went to the national shutdown.” Despite this, Bedford emphasized that at no point did the system “go dark” or “go completely offline” during the incident.
The person responsible for the FAA has insisted that there is no evidence that the incident is due to a cyberattack and has assured that there are "zero proofs that it has anything to do with AI." In his view, the FAA security system is "as safe now as it was two weeks ago."