TEHRAN — The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration grounded every departing flight in the country on Friday, and the public’s first explanation fit in a single phrase: a “temporary telecommunications outage.” The order began at 3:54 p.m. Eastern Time and lasted until 8:15 p.m. It left thousands of flights canceled and a government that has spent months promising a modernized air traffic system, explaining why its old one failed everywhere at once.
The FAA said trouble had hit the Air Route Traffic Control Centers, the facilities that steer planes between airports.
By evening, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy supplied detail. Switches and routers, he said, “got overloaded with data” and began returning inconsistent information.
He corrected himself mid-sentence: “I shouldn’t say they went down.” Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin described new technology “overwhelming the older system,” while Duffy stressed that none of the new equipment failed.
“We have old switches, old routers,” he said. “We use 1980s little copper lines.”
Those accounts do not line up neatly. Mullin said nothing points to a cyberattack and that the failure looked mechanical, then added that officials were “still looking.”
Duffy said he did not want to rule out what he called “nefarious activity.”
