An old copper wire in the bush: why the US had to shut down its airspace

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Officials have all but ruled out a cyberattack or the involvement of any artificial intelligence systems, as attention turns to America’s outdated air traffic system that still uses floppy disks.

Washington: A routine upgrade to an old copper wire communications network in a remote area of the United States was responsible for bringing the nation’s air traffic to a halt, officials said.

They effectively ruled out a cyberattack or the involvement of any artificial intelligence systems, adding that the decision to order a nationwide ground stop was taken out of “an abundance of caution”.

Speaking at a news conference on Saturday morning (US time), Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the instability in the system occurred while telecom contractor L3Harris was undertaking routine maintenance at a remote location to upgrade copper wiring to fibre-optic.

“That router that was being replaced as we switched from copper to fibre started flooding other routers in other air traffic control systems,” he said. “We had over 1000 connection attempts every four to five seconds.”

Those connection attempts began to overwhelm the system, leading to communications issues with airplanes, and disrupted radar feeds. “When we see that, your safety is paramount. We shut down the airspace.”

Officials said they did not yet know whether the initial problem was caused by bad installation work, a wrong configuration or a faulty new router installed in the system.

Duffy said they did not believe any form of nefarious activity was involved. “Once we were able to isolate the work that was being done at that location, all of our systems came back online,” he said.

“This was an FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] system that didn’t meet the moment, a contractor didn’t meet the moment, or equipment didn’t meet the moment.”

FAA administrator Bryan Bedford apologised to the travelling public for the disruption. He said that by the time the ground stop was ordered at 3.45pm Washington time on Friday (Saturday AEDT), about 30,000 of the day’s 50,000 scheduled flights had already landed or were airborne.

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