US lifts nationwide ground stop after aging equipment failure

The United States lifted an hours-long nationwide ground stop at its airports on Friday evening following a major operational disruption attributed to aging equipment failures. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced during a late-night White House briefing in Washington that US airspace officially reopened at 8:15 pm Eastern Time, though he warned passengers that clearing the resulting flight chaos across the country would proceed slowly.

Explaining the root cause of the breakdown, Duffy stated that outdated hardware gave way when network infrastructure became overwhelmed. Specifically, switches and routers were overloaded with data, causing them to go down. Despite the widespread failure, Duffy insisted to the public that the aviation network remained safe for travelers.

The breakdown occurred just one day after the White House and Duffy formally requested $30 billion from Congress to upgrade and modernise the US Air Traffic Control System. Highlighting the state of the infrastructure during the briefing, Duffy questioned whether the public wanted Congress to fund the necessary replacements for hardware that failed under heavy data loads.

Addressing public speculation regarding the cause of the outage, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin explicitly rejected claims that the disruption was the result of a coordinated cyber assault or linked to a global Microsoft outage. Pointing out the date, Mullin acknowledged the coincidence of Friday the 13th and confirmed there was no connection to Microsoft services.

Mullin noted that intelligence and security agencies had observed no digital footprints or hostile chatter, pointing out that responsible parties typically claim credit following major cyber attacks. However, he confirmed that US security and law enforcement agencies are continuing to inspect the systems and have ruled nothing out as investigations into the disruption continue.

During the briefing, officials also defended President Donald Trump, who had not commented publicly on the air stoppage five hours after it began. Mullin stated that President Trump was actively engaged at the White House, immediately gathering personnel in his office and remaining in direct communication with officials throughout the incident.