A single faulty router in Arkansas triggered a nationwide flight grounding on Friday, halting departures coast‑to‑coast and stranding thousands of passengers.
FAA Blames Faulty Router for Nationwide Outage
The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday that the Federal Aviation Administration’s radio site in El Dorado, Arkansas, housed the malfunctioning device that overloaded the agency’s network.
FAA technology chief Rebecca Guy said the initial probe identified two high‑traffic nodes — the Arkansas router and a radar site in Amarillo, Texas — both sending a thousand connections every four to five seconds.
“We saw two places that were actually pinging our network at a very high rate, a thousand connections over every four to five seconds,” Guy told reporters at a Saturday press conference.
The overload stopped all departures while roughly 3,500 aircraft remained airborne; every plane landed safely, but thousands of travelers were stuck at airports.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told CNN’s Dana Bash on Sunday that he bore responsibility for the system’s age, noting that the problematic router had been obsolete for nearly two decades.
“When we do work and things go wrong, of course I’m the secretary,” Duffy said. “But I also have to acknowledge what was delivered to me. I have systems from the 90s, radar from the 60s and 70s, and I take responsibility for what prior administrations gave me, and I will fix it.”
Duffy explained that the air traffic network must be restructured and modernized, noting the router was purchased in 2001 and rendered obsolete by 2006, yet the FAA kept it in service for 20 years.
Across Sunday morning talk shows, Duffy confirmed that flight schedules were rapidly returning to normal.
President Donald Trump amplified the narrative on Truth Social, urging Congress to fund a full overhaul of the air traffic control system, calling the current infrastructure “RIDICULOUS” and “50 years old.”
