US flights grounded LIVE updates: Departures to resume as FAA lifts ground directive after citing ‘extraordinary circumstances’; Homeland Security secretary denies cyberattack, Microsoft outage connection

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US officials fronted the media. Here’s what they say happened

By Kayla Olaya

Earlier this morning, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a rare nationwide ground stop due to “extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety”, triggering the cancellation of more than 5000 flights.

About noon, US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin held a White House media briefing. Here’s what they said.

System failures

Instability in radar, communications and transponder systems across the country ultimately led to the nationwide grounding, Duffy said.

“Our air traffic controllers are well trained. And at 3.36pm [Washington time], we issued a ground stop with over 3500 airplanes in the air.”

An “incredibly old traffic control system” led to an overload of data on the systems,” he said. “Our switches, our routers actually got overloaded with data, and they … started to give us inconsistency in the data from those routers, and because of that, we shut the system down.”

Following the system failures, aircraft only had intermittent communication with traffic controllers, which prompted the shutdown.

“It wasn’t a complete blackout in communication or radar, so we were able to keep some of those communications going, but when you have issues, and you can’t immediately communicate and immediately see where aircraft are at, that’s a risk that we’re unwilling to tolerate,” he said.

Not terror or a cyberattack

Earlier today, Mullin stressed there was no foul play involved in the ground stop and explicitly said it was not a terrorist attack. “This isn’t another 9/11,” he said.

At the press conference, Mullin was asked whether foreign interference could be ruled out as a cause of the system breakdown. He answered that nothing has been ruled out.

“We’re not ruling out anything. What it appears to be right now is … FAA was going in and … putting new equipment and new technology, and that new equipment was overwhelming the older system, which is why Secretary Duffy made it very clear: the patchwork doesn’t work,” he said.

Microsoft outage

The first message uttered in today’s White House briefing came from Mullin, reiterating that the ground stop had no connection to Microsoft’s outage yesterday.

“We’re moving at an unprecedented pace as a whole of government to make sure that we are doing the public justice by making sure everybody is safe, which everybody is.”

The new AI tool

The communications error arrived days after the FAA announced it would begin rolling out an AI tool across the US to help controllers avoid delays, The New York Times reports.

According to that report, the AI tool was initially unveiled in Washington DC airports two months ago on the same day air traffic communications failures also grounded hundreds of flights. The incident occurred after a circuit failed when contractors accidentally ripped through a back-up fibre line.

However, Air Space Intelligence, the company behind the FAA’s new AI-powered air-traffic control system called SMART, denies claims that its technology caused the ground stop.

You can read more information about what the grounding means for you here.