About 7,500 flights were delayed and over 9,000 were canceled on Friday, according to FlightAware. Some 1.5 million passengers were scheduled to take off from airports in the U.S. after 4 p.m. Eastern, shortly after the ground stop began.
“What we’re working to determine is whether we had incompetence or did they install a faulty router,” Duffy said Saturday, which saw nearly 6,000 additional flights canceled.
While that may be true for this specific outage, Duffy warned Friday that what happened was not an isolated incident and said that outages would likely continue to occur until antiquated communications equipment across the FAA’s air traffic control network was brought up to date.
The Transportation Secretary went on to call for Congress to provide $50 billion before the end of the year to upgrade air traffic control and airport infrastructure, increasing the administration’s recent $30.1 billion request, which included $10.1 billion specifically for air traffic control modernization.
TIME has reached out to Duffy’s office for comment.
“There has been a very methodical four-part, four-stage plan to upgrade that,” Booth tells TIME, referencing NextGen, a multibillion-dollar FAA modernization initiative dating to 2003. It has included shifting toward satellite-based aircraft tracking, digital communications, and more efficient flight routes.
“They have tried to squeeze more airplanes into limited space, make better use of the limited runways available in the system, and they started with completely changing the way airplanes are tracked in the world. It's a world standard now,” he says, pointing to how NextGen has already made strides in air travel.
“It's a very highly technical, robust system,” Booth says of the National Airspace System (NAS), “but it seems the weak spot was discovered yesterday afternoon.”
Congress had already ordered an independent review of the FAA’s aging technology: The FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024 required an audit of legacy systems deployed before 2000—including their vulnerability to single-point failures—and a plan to accelerate replacement or improvement of those found to pose risks. In a written response to Congress, the FAA said that nonprofit research organization MITRE completed the audit in August 2025. The response said the findings would guide modernization efforts, but did not disclose the specific findings or resulting actions.
As of Nov. 5, the FAA said it has “replaced 69% of copper wires, installed Surface Awareness Initiative (SAI) systems at 143 towers, transitioned 26 towers to electronic flight strips [and] installed 226 IP Voice Switches.”
Duffy called these efforts “the latest signal that America’s brand new air traffic control system is coming at lightning speed.”
Duffy said at Friday’s press conference that SMART had nothing to do with the disruption.
Why can one equipment failure cause widespread disruption?
For Booth, the spread of that disruption underscores the need for safeguards that can contain a problem in one part of the FAA’s communications network before it affects the wider system.
Booth pointed out that legacy systems—often relying on analog lines, decades-old routers, and interconnected regional hubs—lack the fault-tolerant design needed to prevent a local or routine maintenance glitch from cascading nationwide.
Kumar Sokka, the CEO of Acre Security, says a key consideration when upgrading complex systems is whether individual components can fail without disrupting the entire network.
He says that many industries come up against issues of balancing the high upfront expense of upgrading legacy systems against the severe financial and operational risks of future outages.
“You can do it over time and not necessarily everything at once,” Sokka says. “You can get your software and the data modernized first so you can do preventative work of monitoring the health of a system constantly. And then over time, you can change out the hardware, because that’s the most expensive part.”
Duffy said that the FAA is working to get the travel ecosystem back on track in time for Thanksgiving, which is one of the busiest travel periods of the year in the U.S. According to Airlines for America, nearly 29 million passengers are expected to travel by plane between Nov. 20 and Nov. 30.
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