FAA disables data broadcasting on 69 routers and examines a second unit in Texas

U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on Sunday on ABC's "This Week" that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has disabled the ability to broadcast data on the 69 routers of that model it has in the national airspace. According to Duffy, the router at a radio facility in El Dorado (Arkansas) was broadcasting data to the whole network and, "once we shut the ability to broadcast down, the issue is resolved", according to ABC News.

Duffy added that when the new El Dorado router was switched on during the change from copper to fiber cables, another unit installed some weeks earlier in Amarillo (Texas) "started to flood" the system as well. Both routers are being examined at a lab of contractor L3Harris in Florida, and the FAA is working with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, according to ABC News and Yahoo News. Officials said on Saturday they had found no evidence of a cyberattack.

According to The Wall Street Journal, cited by Yahoo News, the Arkansas router was a new Juniper Networks device installed by L3Harris. A spokesperson for Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which owns Juniper, told the newspaper the devices appeared to have worked as intended: "They did not fail". It is still unknown whether the router was defective or was misconfigured, according to the same report.

Airlines had canceled about 1,570 U.S. flights on Sunday as of 10:00 Eastern time, down from about 6,700 on Saturday, according to FlightAware data reported by Yahoo News. Duffy has warned that more disruptions are possible until the copper lines are fully replaced, at the end of 2028, according to that outlet.