US Reopens National Airspace After Major Air Traffic Control Failure

By Staff, Agencies

The United States lifted an hours-long nationwide airport ground stop on Friday following a major disruption to its air traffic control system, with senior officials blaming outdated equipment and overloaded network infrastructure rather than a cyberattack.

US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced during a late-night briefing at the White House that American airspace had officially reopened, although he warned that it would take time for flight operations to return to normal.

“At 8:15 tonight Eastern Time, we’ve opened up the airspace,” Duffy said, cautioning that the resumption of flights would be gradual.

According to Duffy, the disruption occurred after outdated components of the air traffic control infrastructure became overwhelmed by excessive data traffic, causing critical network equipment to malfunction.

“Our switches, our routers actually got overloaded with data, and they went down,” he explained, pointing to aging hardware as the source of the failure.

The transportation secretary also questioned whether Congress was prepared to provide the necessary funding to modernize the country’s aviation infrastructure.

The incident occurred just one day after Duffy and the White House formally requested $30 billion from Congress to upgrade and modernize the US air traffic control system. Despite the disruption, he insisted that air travel remained safe for passengers.

Meanwhile, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin dismissed speculation that the incident was connected to a coordinated cyberattack against the United States or the major Microsoft outage that had disrupted digital services worldwide.

Mullin stressed that there was no evidence linking the two incidents and rejected suggestions that the air traffic control failure resulted from malicious cyber activity.

“Actually, no cyber attack,” he said, adding that authorities had detected no indications of a group claiming responsibility or other signs typically associated with such operations.

However, Mullin emphasized that US security and law enforcement agencies were continuing their investigations and had not ruled out any possibilities.

The two officials also defended President Donald Trump’s response to the disruption, saying the administration had immediately coordinated with relevant agencies after the incident began.

Mullin said Trump had been briefed and had officials working on the situation, although the president had not made a public statement approximately five hours after the nationwide ground stop began.

The latest disruption has revived concerns about the reliability of America’s aging aviation infrastructure, particularly following a series of radar and communications failures last year involving air traffic controllers managing flights to and from Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey.

Those earlier incidents were traced to problems involving a copper cable responsible for transmitting information, resulting in communications blackouts between controllers and aviation systems.

Several air traffic controllers subsequently took trauma-related leave, further aggravating existing staffing shortages and contributing to significant flight delays and cancellations.

Friday’s nationwide disruption has renewed questions over the need to modernize critical aviation technology and strengthen the reliability of the systems responsible for managing air traffic across the United States.