A single faulty FAA router in rural Arkansas appears to have triggered the nationwide air travel disruption that halted all US flights on Friday, according to a new report.
The issue began at an FAA radio facility in El Dorado, Arkansas, where a recently installed router overwhelmed the 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 failure affected 17 of the FAA’s 22 high-altitude control centers, prompting officials to impose a nationwide ground stop.
More than 3,500 flights were grounded during the approximately five-hour shutdown.
Officials are examining whether defective equipment or installation mistakes by contractor L3Harris contributed to the failure.
El Dorado, a city of roughly 22,000 residents, is located about 210 miles northeast of Dallas.
Investigators are also looking into another router in Amarillo, in the Texas Panhandle, as a possible factor in the outage.
The FAA said there was no evidence that the disruption resulted from a cyberattack.
