WASHINGTON — One day after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) halted every departing flight in the United States for more than four hours, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told reporters on Saturday, November 14, that the failure appears to have started with a single router installed by government contractor L3Harris Technologies during routine maintenance — work that was switching an FAA telecommunications line at a remote site from old copper wire to modern fibre-optic cable. This report follows Awaaz Punjab's earlier coverage of Friday's ground stop itself, which the FAA ordered at about 4 p.m. Eastern on Friday, November 13, and lifted at about 8:15 p.m. the same evening; Saturday brought the first official account of what actually went wrong, the full scale of the disruption, and an open political fight in Washington over what should happen next.
Source: Reuters via The Hindu BusinessLine
Duffy described the mechanism in unusual detail. The new routers, he said, began flooding the rest of the network with more than 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds, overloading communications at 17 of the FAA's 22 en route air traffic control centres — the facilities that manage aircraft flying between airports. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said the agency lost 'the ability for those routers to communicate data' and had to act, but stressed that communications never went down completely and no centre 'actually went dark'; instead, the data flowing through the centres became unstable. Officials told Reuters there may have been problems with routers installed in both Arkansas and Texas. Bedford said investigators have found 'zero evidence of anything nefarious, and zero evidence of anything AI-related,' ruling out a cyberattack.
Source: CNN via KESQ
Installer error or a faulty router? The central question is still open
Duffy was blunt that the root cause has not been settled. '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,' he said. 'What did L3Harris do? Did they make mistakes yesterday? Or was it a faulty router? And we're going to find that out. And frankly, we're going to hold people accountable.' He added that until a new network is built, 'I'm stuck with L3Harris.' Bedford said the review will determine whether the router was installed or configured incorrectly, or was simply defective, and the FAA has set no timeline for concluding it. The routers being replaced are about 25 years old — manufactured around 2001 — and, Duffy noted, were supposed to have been replaced as long ago as 2006.
L3Harris, which operates the FAA Telecommunications Infrastructure (FTI) network linking more than 4,400 FAA facilities, said in a statement that it is 'supporting the FAA in its investigation to understand the conditions that led to the Nov. 13 ground stop of our nation's air travel' and that it takes the stop and its impact on travellers, airlines and air traffic operations seriously. The company said it has completed more than 70 percent of the planned conversion of airspace communications from legacy copper wires to a fibre-optic system, working with its telecommunications partners and the agency. It did not address Duffy's criticism directly or say what went wrong.
Saturday's bill: cancellations far above the FAA's own forecast
The disruption rolled deep into the weekend. More than 6,400 US flights had been cancelled on Saturday as of 9 p.m. Eastern, according to flight-tracking service FlightAware — far above the 4,000 to 5,000 cancellations Bedford had predicted earlier in the day. By mid-afternoon Saturday, with more than 5,000 flights already cancelled, American Airlines led with 892 cancellations, followed by Delta with 734, United with 733 and Southwest with 540, while JetBlue had cancelled 43 percent of its schedule at that point. About 800 flights scheduled for Sunday had already been cancelled by Saturday night, led by American with 293 and JetBlue with 241 — about 26 percent of JetBlue's Sunday schedule. The tracking app Flighty said the outage has now caused more cancellations than the 2024 CrowdStrike software failure. Bedford apologised to travellers on Saturday and said, 'I do think the worst is behind us'; the FAA expects schedules to be back to normal by the end of Sunday.
Source: FlightAware data reported by Yahoo News
Inside the control rooms, the picture was one of improvisation under pressure. Nick Daniels, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, said communications with some planes were disrupted during the outage and controllers moved flights to working frequencies, coordinating across the country to establish whose frequencies and radar were working, and 'ensured the safety of every aircraft.' In a detail that underlined the age of the system, Bedford said maintenance work on the network is still logged on paper, so officials had to search through paper records to figure out who was working where on Friday. Asked why the conversion work was done on a Friday afternoon — the start of a busy weekend travel surge — Duffy said work at small, remote sites is done during the day because it is not expected to affect the wider system, and promised 'there'll be a reevaluation of when we do this work.' Daniels said timing should depend on risk: if the worst outcome is losing all frequencies, such work should happen when the fewest airplanes are in the sky.
Washington splits: 'investment, not an investigation' versus demands for a probe
The failure has split Congress along party lines. House Speaker Mike Johnson, in his first interview since the midterm elections, told Fox News's 'Saturday in America' that no investigation is needed: 'We don't really need any investigation … we need further investment. I mean, some of this equipment dates back to the eighties so it's gotta be updated and that's our responsibility. We're gonna work to get it done.' Johnson said Republicans will use the remaining 50 days of their majority in the lame-duck session to authorise more FAA spending. Democrats took the opposite position, pledging to investigate the ground stop; Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, a senior Democrat on an aviation subcommittee, called for an investigation, and New York Governor Kathy Hochul called on Duffy to resign — a demand a White House spokesperson dismissed to Newsweek as 'a desperate attempt to score political points.'
Source: The Hill
Background: a network long flagged as failing
Friday's collapse is the latest in a series of failures of the FAA's ageing telecommunications system, which has broken down in recent years after accidental fibre-optic cable cuts, an unintended deletion of files and even a strong chemical smell from a melted component. The system's history carries an uncomfortable echo: in 2009, a technician for L3Harris's predecessor, Harris Corp., misconfigured a router while moving the network to fibre, disrupting 129 air traffic facilities, according to a Transportation Department inspector general review. The 2023 nationwide ground stop — the first since the September 11, 2001 attacks — lasted 90 minutes, disrupted 11,000 flights and was caused by a contractor unintentionally deleting files. As recently as September 2026, thousands of flights across the Northeast were delayed or cancelled by the simultaneous failure of a circuit at a Philadelphia facility and a construction crew severing a fibre-optic cable in New Jersey. The FAA still spends $1 billion a year maintaining its old copper-wire system; a September report by the Government Accountability Office said that as of May 2026 the agency had replaced 2,560 of 5,170 old copper wires with fibre. The agency also still uses floppy disks for weather and other critical information at more than 400 facilities — a practice it plans to end by late 2028 — decades-old Compaq computers with replacement parts bought on eBay, and paper flight strips at 49 major airports. A 2023 FAA-commissioned safety review called the system obsolete. 'This was an FAA system that didn't meet the moment,' Duffy said on Saturday.
The money fight is now the main arena. Congress approved $12.5 billion last year to upgrade air traffic control and telecommunications. In September, Duffy asked Congress for $30 billion for new technology, control towers and airport improvements — the figure President Donald Trump has also requested. Duffy has now raised his ask to $50 billion for air traffic control and airports, saying he wants a full overhaul rather than a 'patchwork' fix: 'I want $50 billion,' he said at a White House briefing on Friday night. Bedford clarified that Friday's router swap was routine maintenance, not part of that modernisation programme. Daniels said any new money should also go toward controllers' pay and working conditions.
Travellers whose flights were cancelled are owed a refund if they choose not to fly. Most major airlines are offering travel waivers for rebooking. Promises of hotels and meals generally cover only disruptions within an airline's control — which does not include an FAA ground stop — so check your airline's app before heading to the airport, especially for Sunday travel.
For the Punjabi diaspora in the United States and Canada — among the most frequent long-haul flyers in North America — the weekend's disruption landed in the middle of peak family and wedding-season travel, and missed domestic connections can cascade into long-haul itineraries to India and back. What happens next: the FAA's root-cause review continues with no set deadline; airlines work through the backlog with normal schedules expected by the end of Sunday; and Congress takes up the funding fight in the lame-duck session, where Johnson has promised authorisation work and Democrats have promised an investigation. Whether the router itself was faulty, or the hands that installed it were, is the finding on which accountability — and possibly the $50 billion argument — will turn.