A single malfunctioning FAA router in rural Arkansas may have triggered the nationwide air travel disruption that grounded every US flight on Friday, according to a new report.
The failure began at an FAA radio facility in El Dorado, Arkansas, where a newly installed router overwhelmed the agency’s network with excessive data traffic. The disruption interfered with communications between pilots and air traffic controllers, the Wall Street Journal reported.
“We saw two places that were actually pinging our network at a very high rate, a thousand connections over every four to five seconds,” FAA technology chief Rebecca Guy said Saturday.
The outage disrupted 17 of the FAA’s 22 high-altitude air traffic control centers, prompting officials to impose a nationwide ground stop.
More than 3,500 flights were grounded during the shutdown, which lasted approximately five hours.
Investigators are examining whether faulty hardware or installation mistakes by contractor L3Harris contributed to the breakdown.
El Dorado, a city of roughly 22,000 residents, is located about 210 miles northeast of Dallas.
Officials are also investigating a second router in Amarillo, in the Texas Panhandle, as a possible factor in the outage.
The FAA said it found no evidence that the incident was caused by a cyberattack.