US Federal Aviation Administration rules out sabotage in nationwide flight grounding

• Officials are examining possible installation, configuration or router defects. 
• The FAA imposed a ground stop on Nov. 13, halting departures for more than four hours. 
• Nearly 10,000 cancellations and more than 7,000 delays were reported following Friday's outage. 

Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Administrator Bryan Bedford said investigators have identified an equipment-related fault behind a series of technical errors in the US aviation system, stressing that there is no evidence of malicious activity or artificial intelligence involvement.

“We see zero evidence of anything nefarious, and zero evidence of anything AI-related,” Bedford said, adding that the agency is still working to establish the precise cause of the malfunction.

He said investigators are examining whether the problem stemmed from faulty installation, incorrect equipment configuration or a defective router that caused errors to spread through the system.

Bedford said the FAA would publish its findings once the root-cause investigation is complete, emphasizing that officials want to establish exactly what went wrong before drawing final conclusions.

The comments follow a nationwide FAA ground stop on Friday, Nov. 13, which halted departures across US airports after communications problems affected air traffic control facilities. The disruption lasted more than four hours before authorities lifted the restrictions at approximately 8:15 p.m. Eastern Time.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy previously attributed the outage to overloaded switches and routers in the FAA's older telecommunications network, which supplied inconsistent data to radar and communications systems. The agency halted departures as a precaution because of concerns about the reliability of information available to air traffic controllers.

The disruption caused widespread travel chaos, with nearly 10,000 flight cancellations and more than 7,000 delays reported in connection with Friday's shutdown. Thousands more flights were canceled or delayed on Saturday as airlines struggled to restore normal operations.

The incident has renewed scrutiny of the state of US air traffic control infrastructure, much of which relies on aging technology. A 2024 Government Accountability Office review found that 51 of 138 FAA systems were unsustainable, while another 54 were potentially unsustainable.

Duffy has called on Congress to provide additional funding for a broader modernization of the air traffic control network, arguing that piecemeal upgrades are insufficient to address its longstanding vulnerabilities. Congress previously approved $12.5 billion for modernization in 2025, but the administration says further investment is needed to complete the overhaul.

Read more: US transport. sec. says it is safe to fly as airlines recover from nationwide disruption