BREAKING: FAA says error during copper wire replacement or faulty router to blame for nationwide ground stop

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said that technical issues with replacing copper wire in a remote location and a new router started flooding other telecommunications routers with 1000 connection attempts every four to five seconds, which jammed up the telecommunications system.

In a press conference on Saturday, Duffy said that there were around 3,500 planes in the air when the grounding took place and all aircraft safely landed. He said that air travel is now "operational."

He addressed what took place on Friday and said that the router issue was from "user error" from the company replacing the wire, or there was a faulty piece of equipment.

"Either through contractor error or a faulty piece of equipment, that router that was being replaced as we switched from copper to fiber, it started flooding other routers in our air traffic control system. So specifically, we had over 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds, and what that did was give us issues with our communication with airplanes, and it also caused some disruption with our radar feeds," he said.

"When we see that, your safety is paramount. We shut down the airspace, and we do it safely. We get you on the ground, and then we work on isolating the problem, and then opening the airspace back up, which is what we did yesterday," he added.

Duffy further emphasized a point which he has been hammering on, that the FAA needs more funding in order to modernize the rest of the airline industry.

FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford confirmed on Saturday that there was "zero evidence of anything nefarious, and zero evidence of anything AI-related" that led to the national grounding of all planes on Friday.

"We want to be clear that we have an equipment issue, and we're working through what this defective piece of equipment was again, as the secretary said, was it a faulty installation? Was it a faulty configuration, or was it just a bad piece of router technology that we put into the system that propagated these error," Bedford added.

Despite the resumption of flights, there are heavy delays and cancellations that are taking place as airports are getting back up to speed. There were over 12,500 flights cancelled on Friday and Saturday.

On Friday, the Federal Aviation Administration announced that all flights would be grounded and said that it was the result of a telecommunications issue.