US air traffic control ‘incredibly old’, gave inconsistent data: Why FAA grounded thousands of flights

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The FAA described the problem as "a temporary telecommunications outage" and said it was acting "out of an abundance of caution."

US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said a legacy air traffic control communications system became overloaded and began issuing faulty data, prompting a nationwide “ground stop” on Friday that led to more than 10,000 cancelled and delayed flights.

This comes after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) grounded all departing US flights on Friday for just the second time since the 9/11 attacks in 2001, citing "extraordinary circumstances" caused by communications problems at regional air traffic control centres.

The agency described the problem as "a temporary telecommunications outage" and said it was acting "out of an abundance of caution." The ground stop for US flights, which halted thousands of departures and disrupted travel for hundreds of thousands of people, was lifted after almost four hours.

Duffy attributed the outage to a problem with the FAA's “incredibly old” legacy network.

"Our switches, our routers, actually got overloaded with data... They started to give us inconsistency in the data ... and because of that, we shut the system down," Duffy said at a White House briefing, adding it had intermittent communication and intermittent radar.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said there was no sign of a threat to the United States and "this isn't another 9/11."

"There was no indication, as of yet, that this was a nefarious attack against us; it's just a telecommunications outage, as of right now," he said at a briefing, adding that officials had not ruled out anything at the point.

This was the first nationwide ground stop in the US since January 2023, when a key FAA computer system malfunctioned.

The shutdown came on the same day the White House and the Department of Transportation sought another $30.1 billion from Congress to upgrade airports and air traffic control, including $10.1 billion for air traffic control modernisation.

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