Trump blames US ground stop outage on ‘old broken stuff’ as Duffy points finger at contractor

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Amid Friday’s nationwide ground stop, Trump posted about reviving the entertainment industry

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President Donald Trump suggested Friday that aging equipment, or “old broken stuff,” may be behind a massive air traffic control outage that grounded flights across the U.S., as Democrats demand answers over the airport chaos.

Trump has yet to post about the meltdown on Truth Social or make public remarks. Amid Friday’s nationwide ground stop, he instead posted about reviving the entertainment industry, CNN's Kaitlan Collins noted.

Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy said he spoke on the phone with Trump as the disruption unfolded, and that the president said the outage did not appear to be caused by a cyberattack or AI.

“He said instead this seems to be a situation where there’s a bunch of old broken stuff in the infrastructure that the FAA relies on to keep planes in the sky,” Doocy said during a live appearance on “The Ingraham Angle” from the White House. “He said there’s a bunch of – some of this is like 55-year-old equipment that needs to keep working, keep running, and that they have worked on it, they’ve talked to Congress about replacing, it just hasn’t gotten replaced yet. So that is the first information that we have from the president.”

Lieu also called for congressional hearings to determine what caused the breakdown and what needs to be done to prevent another nationwide disruption.

“What just happened is enormously damaging to trust in our air system, and our air system is a vital component of our national economy,” he said.

Sen. Tammy Duckworth, an Illinois Democrat and ranking member of the Senate Aviation, Space and Innovation Subcommittee, also called for a full investigation into the outage.

“The safety of our skies is built on redundancies,” she said in a statement. “Whatever led to the nationwide ground stop will warrant a thorough and complete investigation.”

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