Trump blames US ground stop outage on ‘old broken stuff’ while Democrats demand answers over airport chaos

President Donald Trump suggested Friday that aging equipment, or “old broken stuff,” may be behind a massive air traffic control outage that grounded flights across the U.S., as Democrats demand answers over the airport chaos.

Trump has yet to post about the meltdown on Truth Social or make public remarks. Amid Friday’s nationwide ground stop, he instead posted about reviving the entertainment industry.

Fox News senior White House correspondent Peter Doocy said he spoke with Trump as the disruption unfolded, and shared the president’s remarks during a live appearance on “The Ingraham Angle” from the White House.

“I did just talk to President Trump on the phone, and this is going to be the first information that we have directly from the president that you’re about to hear,” Doocy said.

“He says it does not seem like this is a cyberattack or AI or anything like that. I asked him a couple different ways, and he said it doesn’t seem like that, and that that is the first thing that they always look for,” he continued.

“He said there’s nobody taking credit, which would be common if somebody did execute a huge cyber attack like this on critical infrastructure, but that he would let us know and the team would let us know if that is something that happened.”

Trump instead pointed to outdated equipment the Federal Aviation Administration uses to keep planes in the air, Doocy said, adding that some of the infrastructure is decades old.

“He said instead this seems to be a situation where there’s a bunch of old broken stuff in the infrastructure that the FAA relies on to keep planes in the sky. He said there’s a bunch of – some of this is like 55-year-old equipment that needs to keep working, keep running, and that they have worked on it, they’ve talked to Congress about replacing, it just hasn’t gotten replaced yet. So that is the first information that we have from the president.”

The FAA ordered a nationwide ground stop Friday after a communications failure affected 22 regional air traffic control centers, causing widespread disruptions at airports across the country.

The order halted departing flights while allowing planes already in the air to land. The outage left travelers facing delays and uncertainty as officials worked to resolve the technical problem and get flights moving again.