Sean Duffy bewilders as 'embarrassing' press conference goes awry: 'Beyond parody'

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy was widely mocked Saturday after technical glitches derailed his press conference on Friday’s nationwide ground stop.

Duffy, flanked by FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford and FAA acting Chief Technology Officer Rebecca Guy, had barely started thanking air traffic controllers when his microphone began echoing. The feedback eventually forced him to stop altogether.

“Hold on a second there. I don’t know what’s going on. I apologize for that,” Duffy said.

Most networks cut away as staff scrambled to swap microphones, Mediaite reported.

“They’re clearly having some technical issues over there at the Department of Transportation,” CNN’s Wolf Blitzer told viewers.

The briefing followed a ground stop that lasted more than four hours Friday, the first nationwide stoppage since January 2023. Duffy blamed contractor L3Harris, saying work to replace old copper wire with fiber at a remote FAA site overloaded the system.

“Our contractor didn’t meet the moment,” Duffy said.

The FAA expected up to 5,000 flight cancellations Saturday as the system recovered. Officials said they saw no evidence of a cyberattack, and Duffy called for billions of dollars to fix the agency’s aging infrastructure.

Critics online seized on the irony.

Political commentator Joanne Carducci, known online as JoJoFromJerz, was blunt.

“Beyond f------ parody,” she wrote.

Democratic strategist Keith Edwards called it a “beautiful metaphor,” and entrepreneur and technologist Gissur Simonarson, co-founder of Cloud Sherpa, piled on.

“They can’t even have a simple press conference without f------ it up,” he wrote.

Attorney Tom Mars took aim at the Department of Transportation.

“Apparently, the DOT guy who installed the upgrade which caused the entire aviation system to crash also upgraded the Secretary’s microphone, which crashed five seconds into his press conference,” Mars wrote. “How embarrassing.”