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What caused the serious glitch that grounded all flights in the US?

2026-11-15 16:11:00Kosova&Bota SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX

What caused the serious glitch that grounded all flights in the US?

The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Friday ordered the suspension of all flights nationwide due to a communications problem affecting air traffic control. The agency said in a statement that the suspension was due to "exceptional circumstances and safety reasons."

Now, according to Reuters, it is reported that the entire defect may have been caused by a single router, installed by government contractor L3Harris.

The incident is the latest example of the aging air traffic control telecommunications system in the US and the difficulties in replacing the systems.

The FAA's aging telecommunications systems have failed in recent years after faulty fiber optic terminations, accidental deletion of files and a strong chemical odor caused by a melted component. Officials said the system will fail again until it is properly upgraded.

"This was an FAA system that did not meet the requirements of the moment," Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Saturday.

Duffy said Friday that L3Harris was performing routine maintenance to switch telecommunications lines from old copper wires to fiber in at least one remote location. Officials told Reuters that there may have been problems with routers installed in both Arkansas and Texas.

"We are working to determine whether we had a failure, meaning it was user error or installer error from L3Harris, or if they installed a faulty router. We have not yet determined what the fault was," Duffy said.

L3Harris said it took the matter seriously and was “supporting the FAA in its investigation to understand the conditions that led to the grounding of air travel on November 13.” L3 noted that it has completed more than 70% of its planned conversion of aerospace communications from legacy copper wires to a fiber-optic system.

The FAA spends $1 billion each year to maintain its aging copper wire system and is racing to replace it with more modern fiber-based communications.

“We need L3Harris or whoever provided us with that router to do a better job,” Duffy said, noting that “almost every institution in America has gone from copper to fiber, from analog to digital.”

The problem began to overload communications at 17 of the FAA's 22 centers across the country, which prompted the FAA to issue a nationwide ground shutdown because it could not identify a root cause.

Duffy said the new routers began flooding other routers with over 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds, which caused communication problems with aircraft and radars at FAA facilities. Bedford said the FAA had to take action when it lost “the ability for these routers to communicate data.” The FAA is still trying to figure out the root cause of what went wrong.

The FAA said communications were not disrupted, but it did cause data instability at the centers. It did not cause the centers to shut down. The routers being replaced are about 25 years old, Duffy said, and were due for replacement in 2006.

Small accidents that lead to catastrophic consequences are nothing new to the U.S. air traffic control network. A 2023 FAA nationwide ground shutdown that lasted 90 minutes and disrupted 11,000 flights was caused by a government contractor inadvertently deleting files.

This led to the first nationwide ground shutdown since the hijacked plane attacks on September 11, 2001.

Friday's outage came as a surge in commuters began traveling over the weekend. Noting the poor timing, Duffy said they would reassess when work would be done on smaller facilities to prevent future disruptions.

The FAA received $12.5 billion from Congress to upgrade its aging air traffic control and telecommunications system, while Duffy has requested another $50 billion for air traffic control and airports.

The FAA said just last week that it would replace aging hard drives used for weather and other critical information at more than 400 air traffic control facilities by the end of 2028. The FAA relies on a telecommunications system that it is rushing to replace, as well as decades-old Compaq computers and replacement parts bought on eBay.

In September, thousands of flights in the densely populated Northeast were delayed or canceled due to twin circuit failures at an air traffic control facility in Philadelphia and the accidental cutting of a fiber-optic cable in New Jersey by a construction crew. The FAA has also been working for years to end a decades-long, long-derided practice of air traffic controllers using paper flight strips to track aircraft.

But the adoption of the change, which began in 2022, at 49 major airports will last at least until 2028.


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