Thousands of travelers are facing another day of canceled flights after a nationwide FAA shutdown brought air travel across the United States to a standstill.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy now says a contractor’s work on an aging communications network may have caused the failure, leaving the government scrambling to explain how a routine maintenance job disrupted thousands of flights.
The shutdown lasted more than four hours on Friday, forcing airlines to cancel flights and leaving passengers stranded at airports across the country. The disruption continued Saturday, with FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford estimating that between 4,000 and 5,000 flights would be canceled out of roughly 41,000 scheduled departures.
Bedford offered an apology to affected travelers but said he believed the worst had passed. “I do think the worst is behind us,” he said, adding that officials expected schedules to return to normal by the end of Sunday.
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The explanation from Duffy has put L3Harris Technologies, the company responsible for operating the FAA’s telecommunications network, under scrutiny. According to the transportation secretary, the trouble began while the contractor was replacing old copper lines with fiber connections at a remote FAA site.
A router involved in the work overwhelmed the wider network, disrupting communications between air traffic controllers and aircraft, as well as radar information. Duffy said investigators were still trying to establish whether the problem came from a faulty router or poor work by the contractor.
“Until I can build” a new network, Duffy said, “I’m stuck with L3Harris.”
He also questioned why the maintenance was being carried out on a Friday afternoon. Duffy explained that work at smaller, remote locations is normally done during daytime hours because it is not expected to affect the wider system. He said there would now be “a reevaluation of when we do this work.”
Today’s nationwide ground stop happened because our air traffic control system is operating on DECADES-OLD, analog equipment that simply cannot compete with the demands of the 21st century.
@FAANews is modernizing this aging infrastructure thanks to a $12.5 billion down payment secured by President Trump, but that isn’t ENOUGH.
@POTUS is asking Congress to give us the resources to build a state-of-the-art air traffic control system. Let’s not do a patchwork fix to a system that’s critical for every single family.
It’s time for Congress to act. Give us the money to fix it. PASS THE MODERN SKIES ACT NOW.
— Secretary Sean Duffy (@SecDuffy) November 14, 2026
The problem is that the FAA’s aging technology has been a concern for years. A 2023 safety review commissioned by the agency described parts of its telecommunications infrastructure as obsolete. There was also a similar incident in 2009, when a technician working for Harris Corp., L3Harris’s predecessor, misconfigured a router during a network upgrade. That disruption affected 129 air traffic facilities.
Duffy acknowledged the scale of the modernization challenge during Friday’s briefing. “What we have is an incredibly old air traffic control system,” he said. He also explained that older switches and routers had become overloaded with data, producing inconsistent information that forced officials to halt departures.
Officials have ruled out a suspected cyberattack as the cause based on what they have seen so far. Duffy said the new equipment installed as part of modernization work did not fail, pointing to the older hardware as the source of the problem.
The financial demands are also growing. President Donald Trump has requested $30 billion for upgrades, while Duffy says he wants $50 billion. Congress approved $12.5 billion last year, but the secretary argues that more money is needed to replace the outdated network.
Featured image via X screengrab
