US aviation shutdown blamed on L3 Harris installed router

A failure involving a router installed by government contractor L3Harris may have caused a nearly five-hour nationwide US aviation shutdown, officials said. The disruption affected more than 20,000 flights and exposed the risks of maintaining ageing air traffic control communications while replacing them.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said routers introduced during routine work to move communications from copper lines to fibre generated more than 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds, destabilising data at 17 of the Federal Aviation Administration’s 22 en route centres. The FAA said communications did not go down entirely, but it could not identify the cause quickly enough to avoid grounding flights. Investigators have not determined whether the problem resulted from human error or faulty equipment; the agency spends US$1 billion a year maintaining the copper system, and the routers were about 25 years old.