Routine maintenance to replace telecom line led to air traffic control outage: U.S. transportation secretary

I want to talk about what actually happened yesterday. Now, those of you who are aviation reporters have heard me talk about a decades-old air traffic control system. And it's not just old equipment. We have an incredibly old telecommunications system. And so here's what we believe happened yesterday. In at least one of our remote FAA locations, a contractor was doing routine maintenance to switch telecommunication lines from old copper wire and they were bringing it over to fiber. That contractor that does the work for us is L3 Harris. They're our legacy provider. They've been working for the FAA for over 20 years and the network that we use at the FAA to control the airspace, L3 Harris actually owns that network. Now, the work happening was due to the age of the copper wire that we were replacing. It was such an old wire that it was being discontinued, meaning that line was going to get shut down. So we had to switch it over from old copper, we had to bring it over to fiber, going from TDM to IP or from analog to digital. I want to be clear, this work has been happening in America for decades. Virtually every single institution in America has gone from copper to fiber, from analog to digital. Maybe the FAA is the last one to be doing this work because the investments haven't been made. But this is not complicated, it's pretty straightforward work that we were doing yesterday at, again, a very remote location. So what we're working to determine was Whether we had incompetence, meaning was it user error or installator error from L3Harris, or did they install a faulty router? We haven't determined what the fault was. Was it the router, or were they not doing great work for us at L3Harris? Either through contractor error or a faulty piece of equipment. That router that was being replaced as we switched from copper to fiber, it started flooding other routers in our air traffic control system. So specifically, we had over 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds. And what that did was gave us issues with our communication with airplanes, and it also caused some disruption with our radar feeds. And when we see that, your safety is paramount. We shut down the airspace and we do it safely. We get you on the ground and then we work on isolating the problem and then opening the airspace back up, which is what we did yesterday. And as we get more information, we'll give this to you. But I think it's pretty clear a lot of questions came in yesterday. Yesterday, was this a cyber attack? Did some foreign nation attack this network? And the answer to that is we don't believe so. Once we were able to isolate the work that was being done at this remote location, all of our systems came back online. So we don't believe this was cyber at all. This was an FAA system that didn't meet the moment, our contractor didn't meet the moment, Or the equipment didn't meet the moment and caused the outages.