After a nationwide ground stop froze air travel across the country, the Trump administration says it has found the culprit, and it is not hackers.
At a late-night press conference Friday, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the ground stop resulted from telecommunications problems caused by "old hardware that went down." The two officials used the moment to press Congress to finally pay for a modern air traffic control system.
Mullin stressed that the day's disruption had no connection to recent problems with Microsoft products. He also sought to reassure travelers that "the public was never at danger through this process. There was never any lives at risk."
Duffy laid out the timeline, saying the trouble began at 3:36 p.m. "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 then ordered, Duffy said, at a moment when more than 3,500 flights were in the air. "Last time I looked, we had less than 400 in the airspace as they were all coming in to safely land."
The secretary pushed back on the speculation that spread through the afternoon. He pointed instead to a problem the administration has warned about for years.
"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."
Duffy explained that aging network equipment buckled under the load. "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."
That distinction is central to the administration's case. The new equipment already installed held up, while the decades-old hardware Congress has yet to fully replace failed.
Duffy cautioned that getting air traffic back to normal is "going to be slow." He described the work ahead for airlines and crews in the hours after the stop.
"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."
Before taking questions, Duffy delivered a direct appeal to lawmakers. "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."
Reporters pressed the officials on whether they could say with 100 percent certainty that a cyberattack was not to blame. Mullin answered candidly: "There's nothing completely certain right now. It doesn't appear that way."
He said there was "no chatter," no one claiming responsibility and no sign that anyone had broken into the system, as reported by The Post Millennial. "However, we're still looking, so we're not going to rule that out," Mullin added.
The $50 billion request is a sharp increase over earlier asks. Congress provided $12.5 billion for air traffic control upgrades through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, while President Trump had sought about $30 billion, and airspace operations were restored later Friday night after a disruption that affected at least 10,000 flights.
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