The United States reopened its airspace on Friday after several hours of grounding departures caused by a communications problem, with officials stressing that there was neither a cyberattack nor any link to the Microsoft outage.
“At 8:15 p.m. Eastern Time, we reopened the airspace,” said Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy at a White House press briefing, blaming “old equipment” from the “1980s” for the cancellation of thousands of flights.
A update to the FAA’s private communications network reportedly triggered a restart of the system, according to several sources cited by CBS News. The computer hardware “was overloaded with data and it failed,” Mr. Duffy explained.
“Our new switches did not fail. It was the old hardware that failed,” he added, before turning to Americans: “Do you want your Congress to fund this? The President has requested the money.”
This outage comes on the heels of the White House’s request to Congress for an additional $30.1 billion in funding to modernize the United States’ air traffic control system.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin added that there was “no cyberattack” and “no link” to the major outage that affected Microsoft on Thursday.
