The United States has officially ended an hours-long nationwide ground stop that paralyzed air travel and resulted in more than 10,000 flight cancellations and delays. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy confirmed late on Friday that US airspace had been reopened, attributing the widespread chaos to aging hardware rather than any external malicious activity.
Addressing concerns regarding the cause of the disruption, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin explicitly stated there was "no cyberattack" and clarified that the incident had "no connection between this and Microsoft." Secretary Duffy added that he had been in communication with President Trump, who remained fully engaged as officials managed the crisis.
According to Secretary Duffy, the failure originated within a legacy air traffic control communications system. The system became overloaded, causing it to transmit inconsistent data. "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 explained during a White House briefing, noting that the outage resulted in intermittent radar and communications coverage.
Following the resolution of the immediate crisis, Secretary Duffy is pushing for a $50 billion investment to modernize the nation's air traffic control infrastructure. While President Trump has requested $30 billion from Congress for these upgrades, Duffy argued that a larger investment is necessary to prevent future failures. "Let’s not do a patchwork fix to a system that’s critical for every single family," he stated. The request follows a previous congressional approval last year of $12.5 billion over five years for modernization efforts. Highlighting the urgency, Duffy pointed to recurring issues, such as past outages in Newark, and emphasized that these systemic problems must be addressed permanently.
