DHS Secretary on ground stop: ‘Not 9/11’

Now we're going to take DHS, Mark Wayne Mullen, DHS Secretary, who's giving us an update on the situation. Well, we are getting him up here in just a second, but I think he is saying that is confirming that it's a telecommunication issue. There's no reason to think that this is some sort of an attack. So it is just a kind of a major outage, I suppose. Yeah, and that is calming, you know, for a lot of people, because I think your mind always goes to the worst when you think of potential safety issues. But just to think about the actually. OK, so we have Mark Wayne Mullen. He is ready right now. Let's take a listen and dip into this. Scared for your loved ones. This isn't. A another 9/11. I just can't repeat that enough. People are making that assumption because that's the last time we had a nationwide ground stoppage. This is a telecommunication outage. This is much different. And just following up on Caitlin's question, there are reports that the FAA was rolling out a new AI traffic control system today. Has there been any link between that? We're looking at that. That that that that word. That's part of something that obviously through CISA at DHS, we're taking a look. We're working with our counterparts throughout all agencies. Are there plans in the air that FAA isn't able to do? No, no. It's just at a different level. The clarity is my understanding. So I'm not trying to get ahead of myself on this one. My understanding is that we can still communicate. It's just that it's at different levels and the clarity that we can get to. But there's redundancy in most communications. So as you can see, there's still planes landing. And so there's still communications going on. We, at an abundant of caution, is the reason why we decided to ground everything. Let me go here. Thank you, sir. This is a ground stop for the United States. Yes. Is this affecting other countries as well? Not that we're aware of. There's two areas that we know that are not affected. I don't think I'm at the ability to share those right now, but there's two areas inside the United States that are still able to communicate just fine. Mr. Secretary, I don't understand that. What does that mean? Can you describe who is helping in investigating the root cause of it as far as what agencies? Worth it. Every agency that has an asset that is involved in this from the communications side, FAA, DOW, State Department, we're all working together, but that's what we do. Right, and I don't want to say that this is a crisis, but it is because we're downing, you know, we had to do a nationwide ground stoppage. It's what the government works well at. That's what we're here for. And so we are well positioned. And communicating very well, the president took a lead in this immediately. And he gave us the assets and the communication to move forward in a fast way. That's what leaders do, and President Trump's the best at leading us. I haven't got you, go ahead. You say this is not a 9-11 style event. But if it is a widespread telecommunications issue. Well, you can't in theory be a cyber attack related to some sort of terror or a version of terror, but the modern-day cyber version. You can't, this isn't the same comparison to 9-11. That is... That's a road I won't go down, but people are making that assumption because it's a stoppage. Do we know what has caused it yet? No, we're going to go through it, but I'm not going to make assumptions. As I've said multiple times, it's very difficult to make assumptions. We want to always deal with facts, and we're going to deal with facts, and as we get them, we'll roll them out to you guys, all right? Thank you, guys. Appreciate it. Terry Duffy here at the White House.