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US aviation regulators have lifted a flight ban from all airports in the country that had been in place for about four hours due to problems with the air traffic control communications system. This has led to cancellations and delays of thousands of flights.
According to FlightRadar24, 4,700 flights were canceled and another 10,000 were delayed during the ban.
According to US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, American aviation authorities have stopped flights at all airports in the country due to “communication problems that affected all regional air traffic control centers.”
According to the BBC's American partner, CBS, citing multiple sources, the suspension of flights was due to an upgrade of the private communications network connecting control centers in the United States.
The operator of this system is L3Harris, CBS reports. As a result of the update, it started to reboot and then crashed.
On its website, L3Harris calls itself an "elite provider" of communications systems for the world's most advanced airspace, weapons and command and control systems. The company did not respond to the BBC's request for comment.
According to CNN, which cites data from the website ATC.com, at least in some areas of the United States, air traffic control centers have completely lost the ability to communicate with aircraft.
“This is not a new 9/11.”
US Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told reporters that the incident was not related to any attack on the US. “These are telecommunications outages. The location of all aircraft has been established,” he said.
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He added that “everyone is safe” and assured that what was happening was not “a new September 11th.”
At the same time, Mullin recalled that the last time all flights to the United States were stopped was after the attack on September 11, 2001.
The minister also noted that the incident with aviation traffic is not related to global outages on Microsoft servers, which, among other things, interfered with the work of the Outlook email client, the Teams video conferencing service and the Copilot AI chatbot.
As BBC correspondents note, Mullin admitted that the American authorities do not yet know what exactly caused the disruption in aviation communications. He said there was no evidence yet that any attack had occurred, but added that he “cannot rule anything out.”
The BBC's transport correspondent writes that American air traffic control systems are very outdated.
Last year, the US Congress allocated $12.5 billion to update them, but this requires much larger investments.
Several weeks ago, the FAA promised to replace systems that still rely on floppy disks, the storage media used in the 1980s and 1990s, by the end of 2028.
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