On Saturday, major airlines canceled more than 4,000 US flights and delayed 3,000 more as the United States worked to rebound from the most prolonged national aviation halt of flights since the September 11, 2001 attacks.
The FAA on Friday issued a countrywide flight ban, national takeoff freeze, and sweeping airspace closure which forced airlines to cancel nearly 1,000 flights and delay more than 7,000 others in one of the worst travel days in US history.
On Saturday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a statement at a press conference, “ We’re working to determine whether we had incompetence, meaning was it user error or installer error from L3Harris, or did they install a faulty ​router? We haven’t determined what the fault was.”
The disruption was far from over as tens of thousands of travelers remained grounded at terminals nationwide, though the FAA finally ended the nationwide flight halt on Friday evening at roughly 8:15 p.m.ET.
Airlines were working to ease airport congestion and reposition flight crews and support staff to recover from the widespread disruption.
Friday’s problem is the most recent and striking evidence of pressure on a US air traffic control network hindered by obsolete technology, equipment and communication breakdowns and a shortage of several thousand controllers.
Furthermore, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin stated there is currently no proof that a cyberattack or a glitch in artificial intelligence triggered the outage although authorities still have to consider other alternatives.
