Here is What Caused Friday’s Nationwide Ground Stop That Resulted in the Cancellation of Thousands of Flights and Stranding of Over 1 Million Travelers

The cause of the nationwide ground stop that resulted in thousands of flight cancellations and stranded over 1 million travelers has been identified. And the source of the outage may come as a surprise to many.

The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday night that officials identified a single router in rural Arkansas as the cause of the worst airport crisis since 9/11. Specifically, the place in question is an FAA radio site in El Dorado, Arkansas.

Network gear at the El Dorado site overloaded the communications system used by thousands of air traffic control pilots. There were thousands of connections every four or five seconds.

Officials strongly suspect that a radar site in Amarillo, Texas contributed to the outage as well.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Initially, FAA employees tasked with troubleshooting the problem—one that wound up grounding much of U.S. travel—started their hunt in Indianapolis, according to people familiar with the situation.

But then, they zeroed in on two locations: an FAA radio site in El Dorado, Ark., and a radar site in Amarillo, Texas, the people said.

Network gear at the Arkansas site, and possibly the one in Texas, overloaded the communications system that thousands of air-traffic controllers use to guide pilots through the nation’s airspace.

“We saw two places that were actually pinging our network at a very high rate, a thousand connections over every four to five seconds,” Rebecca Guy, the FAA’s technology chief, said at a Saturday press conference.

In total, the outage affected 17 of the FAA’s 22 high-altitude control centers. Because of this, officials felt they had no choice but to issue the nationwide ground stop.

Per the Journal, these pings from the Arkansas and Texas sites traveled through a tangle of copper wires and fiber-optic cables that go into the FAA Telecommunications Infrastructure.

As Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy previously noted, the decades-old system is outdated.

Defense contractor L3Harris Technologies, which Duffy has singled out for blame, oversees the system. It includes important connections for radar, communications, and flight data.

One question that remains unanswered is whether the problems on Friday resulted from a faulty router or from L3Harris not configuring it properly.

Duffy confirmed on Fox News Sunday that the problem involved the routers in Texas and Arkansas. He also said that his department spoke with L3Harris and that the contractor has secured the two routers.

L3Harris will be conducting deep diagnostic testing on the routers at their headquarters in Florida.

Duffy maintained that there is no evidence of a foreign cyberattack.

WATCH:

UPDATE: We spoke with the CEO of L3Harris, and the contractor secured the two routers from the remote FAA facilities in Texas and Arkansas. L3Harris is now conducting deep diagnostics testing at their headquarters in Florida. @FAANews, Juniper, and Cisco engineers are assisting as well.

We have no indication of a foreign cyberattack and we will continue to investigate alongside the FBI and our federal law enforcement partners.

We took the extraordinary measure of issuing a nationwide ground stop. I want to be crystal clear for everyone in America, my number one priority is to make sure you get to your destination safely @FoxNewsSunday

— Secretary Sean Duffy (@SecDuffy) November 15, 2026

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