Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy says a federal contractor may be behind Friday’s nationwide ground stop, and he’s promising consequences. “We’re going to hold people accountable,” Duffy said at a Saturday news conference, one day after the Federal Aviation Administration stopped every departing flight in the country for nearly five hours.
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A ground stop is an FAA order that keeps planes on the ground. It usually hits one airport because of weather or short staffing. Friday’s order covered the whole country. It came in the middle of the afternoon while about 3,500 flights were already in the air. All of them landed safely, and the order was lifted around 8:30 p.m. Eastern.
It was the first nationwide ground stop since January 2023. The one before that came on September 11, 2001.
The fallout went well past Friday night. FlightAware counted about 9,159 canceled flights and more than 7,000 delays on Friday. Another 3,800 or more flights were canceled and roughly 2,000 delayed on Saturday as airlines moved planes and crews back to where they needed to be.
Duffy gave the government’s account at Transportation Department headquarters. He said L3Harris Technologies, which has run the FAA’s telecommunications network for more than 20 years, was doing what he called routine maintenance at a remote FAA site. The job was replacing old copper telephone wire with fiber. Duffy said something in that work flooded the FAA’s routers with more data than they could handle, and information stopped reaching air traffic controllers the way it should.
Duffy said officials still don’t know exactly what failed. “Was it user error or installation error from L3Harris, or did they install a faulty router? We haven’t determined what the fault was,” he said. At another point he asked out loud, “Did we have incompetence?”
He went straight at the contractors. “Many of our contractors, many of our partners, they take our money and they provide really poor service to us,” Duffy said. He called L3Harris the FAA’s “legacy provider” and admitted the department is stuck with the company for now.
L3Harris did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The equipment behind the nationwide ground stop is old. Duffy said the routers at these facilities were made in 2001. Senior government sources said the problem traced back to Cisco routers built between 2001 and 2006. Duffy blamed “old switches, old routers” and said, “This was an FAA system that didn’t meet the moment.”
Reporters asked why the work happened on a busy Friday afternoon and not overnight. Duffy said the FAA does maintenance at small remote sites during the day because that work isn’t supposed to affect the wider system. “It shouldn’t have that kind of impact, which is what we saw yesterday,” he said.
Officials also ruled out hackers. Duffy said the department doesn’t believe the outage was a cyberattack, because every system came back online once crews isolated the work at the remote site. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said Friday there was no sign of an attack. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford, who stood next to Duffy on Saturday, said there was no evidence of anything nefarious.
The nationwide ground stop also hit at the worst possible time for college sports. Friday is the main travel day for college football teams with Saturday games. “We’ve had some disruptions to the college football schedule,” Duffy said. Second ranked Utah couldn’t leave for its game at Arizona after the pilots’ hours ran out during the stoppage. Texas and Tennessee were both stuck on the ground and went back to campus before trying again. Ole Miss’s game at Oklahoma was moved to Sunday at 1 p.m. Auburn and Tulane gave up on flying and took buses, and the Big 12 said it was reviewing its Saturday schedule. NBA and NHL teams were scrambling too.
The money fight is already starting. The administration raised its air traffic control funding request to $50 billion late Friday. Duffy said the $12.5 billion already set aside to modernize the system isn’t enough. The FAA sits inside Duffy’s own department, which means the contracts, the oversight and the upgrade timeline all run through the same agency now pointing at L3Harris.
By Saturday, Duffy said, “We are back at full operations.” He warned that some delays and cancellations would continue while airlines reset their schedules, and told travelers to check with their airline before heading to the airport.
