- FAA ordered nationwide ground stop for departing flights.
- Legacy ATC system overload caused data inconsistency.
- Cyberattack and Microsoft outage link ruled out.
All departing flights were grounded for a brief time across airports in the United States on Friday, leaving over 1.5 million passengers stranded. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ordered a flight departure halt.
Although the ground stop was lifted, the disruptions are expected to last for days. The incident led to over 10,000 flight delays and over 4,000 cancellations, in the second such halt instance after 9/11. US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said that many passengers have been forced to spend the night at airports. The grounding came simultaneously to a Microsoft outage, leaving people around the world anticipating if it had any role in the massive and unprecedented travel disruption.
What caused the grounding?
Speaking at a White House briefing, Duffy revealed that the legacy air traffic control communications system got overloaded and started giving faulty data. This led to a nationwide stop to all departing flights. "Our switches, our routers, actually got overloaded with data... They started to give us inconsistency in the data ... and because of that, we shut the system down," Duffy said.
ALSO READ: US Briefly Grounds All Departing Flights For Second Time Since 9/11, Flight Delays Expected
He said that the 'incredibly old' US ATC system relies on an analogue system and got overloaded with data.
During the overload, the system experienced intermittent communication and radar issues, he added. The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has rejected any cyberattack behind the incident; instead, the DHS chief attributed the communications failure to a telecommunications outage.
Microsoft outage link ruled out
After the second nationwide ground stop in 23 years was announced, social media erupted in chaos. Users started anticipating a potential link between the massive halt and the ongoing Microsoft outage.
However, the Department of Homeland Security ruled out any link between the two incidents during his White House briefing.
United States Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin said, "I want to make sure everybody understands that there is no connection between this and Microsoft. I know a lot of people are making that jump. So far, what we've seen is that there is actually no cyber attack. We're still working through that process; our teams are working. This is what the leadership of President Trump looks like by the organisation, and the team he has put together. We are built to handle crisis like this and that's exactly what we are doing.,"