If you’ve ever changed your own wiring at home, you know how it goes: one minute you’re jamming all your joined-up wires into a junction box; you’re sure you got everything color-coded and in the right order; and then you flip a switch and all the flights in the country are grounded for four hours, inconveniencing potentially millions of people. Oh wait, that last part only happens if you’re the FAA, or a piece of FAA equipment like a router, or an FAA contractor.
As Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy sort of explained in a Washington, D.C. press conference on Saturday, the nationwide flight grounding on Friday was all some kind of silly wiring snafu—probably, and also probably not a cyberattack.
“This was an FAA system that […] didn’t meet the moment; our contractor didn’t meet the moment. Or the equipment didn’t meet the moment, and caused the outages,” Duffy said.
Duffy didn’t exactly blame the defense and infrastructure company L3Harris, but seemed to say L3Harris’ work created the circumstances that led to the transportation meltdown. L3Harris was working on “routine maintenance to switch telecommunication lines from old copper wire, and they were bringing it over to fiber.” This all happened, Duffy said, “in at least one of our remote FAA locations.”
