In a Saturday morning press briefing, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy blamed “routine maintenance” by L3Harris Technologies for triggering Friday’s nationwide ground stop, which resulted in the cancellation of thousands of flights and ongoing travel disruptions.

Duffy said L3Harris was upgrading telecommunications lines from copper wire to fiber in a remote location when the router that was being replaced started flooding other routers in the air traffic control system with over 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds. That caused disruptions in communications and radar feeds and led the FAA to issue the ground stop while it worked to isolate the problem. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said the issue affected 17 of 22 en route facilities and was propagating into low-altitude radar facilities and TRACONs.

Duffy said it’s not yet clear whether the issue was caused by a faulty router or improper actions by L3Harris personnel, but he vowed to “hold people accountable.”

“Many of our contractors, many of our partners, they take our money and they provide really poor service to us,” Duffy said. “We’ve demanded better because the American people deserve better, and we’re getting better performance from everyone who’s doing business with us now. We need L3Harris or whoever provided that router to us to do a better job.”

After the initial publication of this article, an L3Harris spokesperson provided the following statement to The Air Current: “L3Harris has been modernizing the communications infrastructure supporting the National Airspace System in close coordination with the FAA. With safety and reliability as our highest priorities, L3Harris, together with its telco partners and the FAA, has completed more than 70% of the planned airspace communications conversion from legacy copper wires to a fiber optic system. We are supporting the FAA in its investigation to understand the conditions that led to the Nov. 13 ground stop of our nation’s air travel. L3Harris takes the nationwide ground stop and its impact on travelers, airlines and air traffic operations seriously.”