US: What exactly caused the longest nationwide ground stop in 25 years?

After a nearly five-hour ground stoppage, flights in the U.S. have resumed, but officials are warning that it will take days to recover from the ongoing delays related to the incident. A failure in aging telecommunications equipment forced a nationwide halt to departures from U.S. airports, according to the Transport Secretary Sean Duffy and Homeland Security Secretary Mark. Wayne Mullen says officials have found no evidence so far of a cyber attack, but that U.S. lawmakers are calling for an investigation into the cause of this disruption. To discuss all of this further, we're joined by Shirley Sipon from our news desk. So, Shirley, of course, you know, we've been reporting on this all morning. Good morning. Officials say it's aging infrastructure, aging telecommunications. What more can you tell us about what caused this? catastrophic travel breakdown. Yes, we understand that they took that decision to cancel all these flights, almost 6,000 of them, because they wanted to, you know, to take the safe way out of this. There were disruptions, gaps between the information they were getting from the flight systems, from the flight control systems and what they were seeing on radars. So in order to avoid a catastrophe, they basically grounded all the planes. So that's what we've been seeing. So yes, they're saying no foul play, no cyber attack, no link with what we saw yesterday at Microsoft, but questions, as you've said, a question, well, when they try to modernize this old system, did they take the right decisions? And some questions are emerging now, and even something that could be seen as criticism. Even within the administration, let's listen to Mark Wayne Mullen, as you said, Homeland Security Secretary. He explains what he thinks may have gone wrong today and yesterday. Let's listen. Cyber security, once again, we're still looking at it. We're not ruling out anything. What it appears to be right now is as Secretary Duffy and FAA was going in and putting patches into the system, they were putting new equipment. Um, and, uh, new, um, technology and that new equipment, new technology just wasn't, it was overwhelming the older system, which is why secretary Duffy made it very clear. The patchwork doesn't work. We need one complete system. So, yes, maybe the road they chose was not the right one. Maybe that was a risk. They say they need maybe to resume and try and modernize the system as a whole, which will be very. They're pleading for at least 30 billion. That's a long-term request, $30 billion to modernize the system. That's one element of criticism. But in just over 20 minutes, we'll hear those two officials again to try and understand a little bit more about what went wrong and what to expect. And hopefully how to avoid it. And of course, Shirley, this is coming just ahead of American Thanksgiving, which, as everyone knows, it's the busiest travel period in the United States. So is there risk of more travel delays at this point? Absolutely. That's what we've been hearing. They're taking no risks and saying that, yes, the Americans and those who are taking are expected to take flights. Millions who want to return home, probably, and other people just traveling in this period will have to expect more flight cancellations. That's what the U.S. Transportation Secretary has been saying. And this comes also with other criticism because. The way the crisis itself today was handled with many people waiting for hours and hours with no real information about what was going on and what to expect, saying that their flight would take off in an hour and two hours, just waiting throughout the day without any clear explanation, sometimes wrong explanation, saying it's the wind and some other reasons. And also what happened around this with various people who saw their flights canceled, who tried to book hotel rooms. I mean, this is a totally other. problem, but still saw the prices of hotel rooms flying up, although they had already tried to book those rooms. So a lot of questions about how all this was handled and if they could have done a better job at working out this problem. Shirley, thank you so much for that. That's Shirley Sitbon from our news desk.