The US rules out a cyber attack or AI in the chaos at all its airports: it points to a fiber company or a router

The Secretary of Transportation of the United States, Sean Duffy, confirmed this Saturday that the total suspension of takeoffs ordered this Friday was not due to a cyber attack. Instead, it points to failures in an obsolete aerial system and talks about a possible "defective router", although they continue to investigate the specific causes of the incident. At the moment, the number of affected flights increases this Saturday to more than 25,000, of which 17,000 have been canceled and the rest have suffered delays.

"We do not believe at all that this was a cyber attack. It was a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) system that was not up to the task. Our contractor was not up to par, or the equipment was not up to par, and that caused service interruptions," Duffy commented at a press conference.

According to the secretary, the problem began when a contractor from the company L3Harris, which provides services to the FAA, was carrying out routine maintenance to replace the old copper wiring with fiber optics, which caused a saturation in the air traffic control system.

"We are trying to determine if there was incompetence, that is, if it was human error or an installation failure on the part of L3Harris, or if they installed a defective router. We have not yet determined what the failure was," added Duffy. The replacement router apparently flooded other routers in the air traffic control network with data with thousands of connection attempts, causing a system crash. Air traffic controllers stopped being able to communicate with the planes and receive radar data.

He has also insisted on his request for more funds from Congress, from which he has requested 30.1 billion dollars (just over 27.3 billion euros) to modernize air infrastructure, and has assured that the president, Donald Trump, is willing to work on this with the Democrats, who will assume control of Congress in January.

No evidence of "malicious intent"

FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford has reaffirmed to the press that there is no "proof of malicious intent" behind the telecommunications problem. Bedford has also ruled out a relationship between Friday's failure and a new artificial intelligence system that the FAA has implemented in recent months to help manage weather conditions and flight paths. "It is a system that is not linked or connected to the systems that suffered the interruption yesterday," he added.

"There were random reports coming in from different facilities of frequencies coming in and out, so they were forced to switch between primary and backup systems," Bedford said. "If it had been a single origin we would have overcome it, but when we saw that there were two, three, ten, 17 origins we began to realize that something much bigger was happening," he added.