FAA lifts nationwide ground stop; Duffy says old routers 'got overloaded with data' and tells Congress to fund a new system

The FAA lifted its nationwide ground stop Friday night after more than four hours, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy went to the White House briefing room to explain what went wrong.

"Our switches, our routers actually got overloaded with data," Duffy said. He said the old analog telecom equipment "started to give us inconsistency in the data" from radars and in communication with airplanes at the FAA's en route centers and TRACON approach facilities, "and because of that, we shut the system down."

Duffy said some of those switches have already been replaced, and "our new IP switches did not go down. It's the old hardware that went down."

He said more than 3,500 planes were in the air when the ground stop was issued and that controllers and pilots followed their procedures to bring them down safely. Medevac, critical cargo and law enforcement flights were still allowed to move. "We didn't lose all telecom, we didn't lose all radar," he said, but the stop was ordered out of "abundance of caution."

Duffy then turned to Congress. "The president for the last year has been asking Congress to fully fund a full build of a brand new air traffic control system," he said. "Do you want your Congress to fund this? President Trump has asked for the money." He said the president has asked for $30 billion and that he wants $50 billion, "so we never have to come at 8:30 at night and have a press conference on why air travel was shut down."

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said earlier there was no indication the outage was a nefarious act. Airlines have warned that cancellations and delays will spill into Saturday.