Duffy Traces Friday's Ground Stop to a Contractor's Router Swap and Vows Accountability as Flights Return to Full Operations

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy says the failure that froze every departing flight in America on Friday began with a routine upgrade, not an attack. A contractor, L3Harris, was switching decades-old copper telecommunications lines to fiber at a remote Federal Aviation Administration site when the trouble started, Duffy said, according to CNBC.

A router made by L3Harris and installed for the FAA sat at the center of the breakdown, Reuters reported. Once it came online, Duffy said, it began flooding other routers on the air traffic control network with connection attempts until the system was overwhelmed, CNN reported. The flood destabilized communications data at 17 of the FAA's 22 en route centers, the facilities that guide planes between airports, and because engineers could not immediately find the root cause, the agency halted departures nationwide, according to Reuters. The FAA told Reuters that communications did not fail outright and that no center went dark; controllers instead saw unstable, inconsistent data.

Investigators have not yet decided which it was. Duffy said officials are working out whether the installer made a mistake or the router itself was faulty, CNN reported. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said the review will determine whether the router was installed or configured incorrectly or was simply defective, Fox Business reported.

L3Harris said it is supporting the FAA in its investigation into the conditions that led to the Nov. 13 ground stop, according to Reuters. Duffy has made clear he expects better. He said whoever supplied the router has to do a better job, Reuters reported, and he said people will be held accountable if mistakes were made, according to Fox Business.

There is history here. In 2009, a technician for Harris Corp., the company that later became L3Harris, misconfigured a router while moving the FAA's network to fiber, disrupting 129 air traffic facilities, according to a Transportation Department inspector general review cited by Fox Business.

Duffy has framed the outage as the bill coming due for years of neglect. The routers now being replaced are about 25 years old and were supposed to be swapped out in 2006, he said, according to Reuters. That timeline matters. The equipment that failed on Friday was overdue for replacement long before this administration arrived, and Duffy has tied the breakdown to the country's aging aviation infrastructure while pressing for more money to finish the upgrades, ABC7 New York reported.

Not everyone accepts his account. Some air traffic controllers told CNN they "don't buy" Duffy's explanation, and the head of the controllers' union said communications with some aircraft were disrupted during the episode, Yahoo News reported.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul went further on Saturday, calling on Duffy to resign or be removed by President Trump, ABC7 New York reported. Hochul blamed controller shortages and repeated communications breakdowns on his leadership and urged Congress to open a full investigation.

Duffy's answer has been to keep the focus on getting travelers home and fixing the cause. He said Saturday that air traffic operations were back to full strength, while warning that passengers would keep seeing some delays and cancellations as airlines reposition planes and crews, CNN reported. The aftershock is still large: Saturday cancellations topped 5,000 by early afternoon, according to Yahoo News.

The FAA's review of the router and the installation work will decide whether the fault lies with a person, a part or a process. Whatever it finds, the answer should be made public, and any contractor that falls short on work this critical should answer for it, exactly as Duffy has promised.

For travelers, the advice for the rest of the weekend stays simple: check your airline's app before you leave for the airport, because aircraft and crews are still out of position.

The larger lesson is the one Duffy has been making for months. A country that moves millions of people through its skies every day should not be one router away from a nationwide shutdown. Fixing that takes modern equipment, real oversight of the contractors who install it and the money to finish the job, and Friday's failure has put all three squarely in front of Congress.