Update: Finger-pointing begins as chaos from FAA shutdown slowly abates

The emergency order has been lifted, but the chaos and logjams remain at airports across North America Friday night.

A rare ground stop order issued by the Federal Aviation Administration on Friday afternoon halted all takeoffs from U.S. airports, leading to massive backlogs of flights and a cascade cancellations after a key communications platform used by air traffic controllers and pilots started cutting in and out of service.

The ground stop order was lifted at 8:15 p.m. ET, but by then, the bottleneck had built. At Vancouver International Airport, there were more than 150 delayed flights and 69 cancellations as of 7 p.m. PT, according to the flight traffic tracking website Flight Radar 24. By 1 p.m Saturday, the backlog was just 33 cancelled flights and 85 delays.

CNN reported the issue started in a network router at Chicago Midway International Airport before cascading across the United States.

CBS News reported than an update to a private communications network which handles radio frequencies air traffic controllers use to communicate with pilots caused the system to reboot, then crash. The system is operated by L3Harris, a defence contractor and technology company.

The communication disruption comes just days after the FAA expanded its use of artificial intelligence with the addition of a cloud-based management system. U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the problem lay with the agency’s older, “outdated” systems.

“Welcome to Friday the 13th,” Duffy said as he began a media briefing at the White House Friday night.

“It’s an old system that went down, and went down everywhere. It got overloaded … our fix gives us a pretty good indication that it was a legacy network problem.”

Duffy walked that back on that Saturday during a briefing, saying it was unclear whether the blame lay with L3Harris — the contractor who runs the SMART cloud-based system — or the faulty system. He said an L3Harris contractor working “in a remote site” was switching a system from copper wire to fibre optic cable when the router began spamming others connected with the network with thousands of requests every few seconds, effectively shutting it down.

“We’re working to determine whether we had incompetence, meaning was it user error or installer error ​from L3Harris, or did they install a faulty router? We haven’t determined what the fault was,” Duffy said. “We need L3Harris or whoever provided that router to us to do a better job.”

The work has been ongoing for several months, and L3Harris said it had completed 70 per cent of its work, transitioning the system from copper wiring to fibre optic cable.

The FAA has been dealing with outages across its network in recent years because of decades-old equipment, with the Department of Transportation spending US$12.5 billion from Congress to address the issues. Duffy asked for an additional $30 billion for that work earlier this week, and reiterated that request at Friday’s briefing.