Administrator of the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Bryan Bedford listens, as US Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy speaks during a press conference after the FAA issued a national ground stop yesterday, at the Department of Transportation in Washington, DC, US, November 14, 2026. REUTERS/Eric Lee
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy blamed a "legacy provider" for Friday's widespread ground stop that impacted more than 1 million travelers across the country.
Duffy blamed telecom provider L3Harris for the outage, though he admitted the Department of Transportation is continuing its root-cause analysis. He claimed that the contractor was updating a router at a remote location that injected instability into the system.
"This is L3Harris," Duffy said. "It's our legacy telecomnetwork. It's owned byL3Harris. With our new architecture, with the money that we're requesting, we will work with the greatest telecom companies in the world, which will be AT&T, Verizon, and Lumen. They're allworking with us on the newarchitecture. But in themeantime, until I can buildthat, I'm stuck with L3Harris,which owns this network."
Speculation swirled on Friday that the DOT's new SMART weather system could have caused the outage. The company that installed that system, Air Space Intelligence, had previously donated to Duffy's son-in-law's political campaign.