The country is on edge as freezers and email go haywire, and the federal government wasn’t taking any chances either when the FAA saw a communications issue.
On Friday, the regulator ordered a nationwide ground stop for several hours, forcing airlines to delay and cancel thousands of flights, after a communications problem affecting air-traffic control was detected.
Officials said there was no evidence of a cyberattack or other nefarious activity, but the speed with which the telecom issue spread was alarming enough to briefly elevate it to the highest echelons of government.
During a press briefing on Saturday, FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said the White House situation room and the entire national security infrastructure were activated, noting that the FBI was also in facilities to investigate.
“I think we’ve all concluded that it’s not a cyber issue,” he declared.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said FBI Director Kash Patel, the director of national intelligence, and the Defense Department participated in a conference call because they were concerned there was a cyberattack from another country.
But they didn’t see any online chatter to indicate a hacking attempt, Duffy added. And once the FAA isolated the location where the telecom problem originated and took it offline, then the system began functioning properly again.
“We feel very comfortable that that was the root cause of the impact on our system,” he said. “It wasn’t a foreign actor.”
Still, cybersecurity has been top of mind lately. Hackers raised the temperatures in freezers across Europe and at U.S. military bases, making food go bad.
Last month saw so many cyberattacks that it was dubbed “Black October.” Cybersecurity experts also rushed to fix vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language that’s used in nearly 70% of all websites.
After the U.S. launched its war on Iran, the regime warned it would retaliate via cyberspace and threatened to cut undersea cables that carry internet traffic.
Meanwhile, consumers are still grappling with the aftermath of a Microsoft outage that shut down email, collaboration and AI functions. The company said Friday it had no indication that the ground stop was related to its global outage.
What actually caused the problem was more mundane.
It began when a contractor with L3Harris was doing routine maintenance at a remote FAA location to switch telecommunication lines from old copper wire to fiber optics, according to Duffy.
But the changeover caused routers across the air traffic control system to be flooded with more than 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds, he explained. Because it disrupted some radar feeds, the FAA ordered the ground stop to ensure safety.
“So what we’re working to determine was whether we had incompetence, meaning was it user error or installator error from L3Harris, or did they install a faulty router,” Duffy said. “We haven’t determined what the fault was. Was it the router or were they not doing great work for us at L3Harris?”
He later pointed out that the company owns the legacy telecom network, while the department is working with “the greatest telecom companies in the world,” like be AT&T, Verizon, and Lumens to build a new architecture.
Duffy also stressed again that L3Harris owns the network and is the prime contractor, warning that the department will hold people accountable.
“Many of our contractors, many of our partners, they take our money and they provide really poor service to us,” he complained. “And we have demanded more. We’ve demanded better because the American people deserve better. And we’re getting better performance from everyone who’s doing business with us now. We need L3Harris or whoever provided that router to us to do a better job.”
An L3Harris spokesperson said the company has been modernizing the communications infrastructure for the National Airspace System in close coordination with the FAA.
Along with its telecom partners and the FAA, L3Harris added that it has completed more than 70% of the conversion from legacy copper wires to a fiber optic system.
“We are supporting the FAA in its investigation to understand the conditions that led to the Nov. 13 ground stop of our nation’s air travel,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “L3Harris takes the nationwide ground stop and its impact on travelers, airlines and air traffic operations seriously.”