BREAKING: Trump admin says FAA ground stop caused by ‘old hardware that went down,’ demands Congress fund aviation package

In a late-night press conference, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Friday’s nationwide ground stop was a result of telecommunication issues that arose from “old hardware that went down.”

Mullin stressed that there was no connection between the day’s issues and recent issues experienced with Microsoft products, and that “the public was never at danger through this process. There was never any lives at risk.”

Duffy said that at 3:36 pm, “we experienced instability for our radar and our communications in our centers and our TRACONs across the country. So, if you don’t know this, at airports we have towers. The next rung out is a TRACON. After that, we have en route centers. The TRACONs and the centers. We started to have inconsistency in the data from the radars and our communication with airplanes.”

A ground stop was issued, he said, with over 3,500 flights being in the air at that point. “Last time I looked, we had less than 400 in the airspace as they were all coming in to safely land.”

“So what happened, right? I’ve heard a lot of the rumors, like Markwayne has, but what we have is an incredibly old air traffic control system. I think every single one of your networks have covered the president and myself talking about this for the last two years. The president, for the last year, has been asking Congress to fully fund a full build of a brand new air traffic control system.”

He said that “Our switches, our routers actually got overloaded with data, and they went down. And I shouldn’t say they went down. They started to give us inconsistency in the data from those from those routers. And because of that, we shut the system down. Now I have already replaced some of those switches with President Trump, and our new IP switches did not go down. It’s the old hardware that went down.”

He said that restoration of normal air traffic is “going to be slow,” adding that “We’re going to try to move as many of those as we can tonight, if we have the capacity with crews to to move those flights. If not, we’re going to start tomorrow morning with our airline partners moving those aircraft. But it’s going to take us some time to unwind what’s happened this afternoon.”

Duffy concluded before taking questions, “This is an emergency. I want Congress to give us emergency funding. This is bipartisan. This is American. I want 50 billion dollars. President Trump is a builder. He’s going to build this network and deliver for the American people. But the president can’t deliver for America unless the Congress delivers the money to make it happen.”

The officials were asked if they could say with 100 percent certainty that the overloaded systems were not caused by a cyber attack. Mullin said, “. There’s nothing completely certain right now. It doesn’t appear that way.” He said there’s “no chatter” or people taking responsibility or indications that people got into the system, “However, we’re still looking, so we’re not going to rule that out.”