Transportation secretary says router malfunction during upgrade caused flight shutdown

Following a four-plus-hour grounding of air travel across the United States Friday, Nov. 13, the Federal Aviation Administration and the U.S. Transportation Department provided more specifics on the root cause of the system failure that precipitated the emergency. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said during a press conference Saturday morning that FAA contractor L3Harris was executing a transition from copper to fiber-optic cables at a remote location and that a new router flooded the FAA’s network. The officials explained that the router made 1,000 connection attempts every four-to-five seconds before being disabled. “What we’re working to determine was whether we had incompetence, meaning was it user error or installation error from L3Harris or did they install a faulty router. We haven’t determined what the fault was,” Duffy said.

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