US nationwide flight ground stop: "Our routers got overloaded with data"

America's airspace has reopened and flights have resumed. On Friday, the Federal Aviation Administration issued a rare nationwide ground stop. More than 8,200 flights, or over 31% of those scheduled in the United States, were canceled. Tens of thousands of passengers were stranded. The ground stop lasted nearly five hours and was the US's longest since the one after the September 11th attacks back in 2001. Officials blamed outdated air traffic communications equipment and said that there was no evidence of a cyber attack. Take a listen. Our switches, our routers actually got overloaded with data and they went down. And, I shouldn't say they went down, they started to give us inconsistency in the data from those routers. And because of that, we shut the system down. Now, when we start looking at cyber threats, cyber attacks, typically some people is going to raise their hand up and say, hey, we did that. There's no chatter. We haven't seen any footprints, as you would say, or identifications of people that got into the system. It appears that this was mechanically driven. Well, this was the first nationwide stop since January 2023 when another FAA computer system that sends notices to pilots malfunctioned. But if outdated equipment isn't replaced, it raises a question of if ground stops like this will only become more common. The ripple effects of Friday's disruption and delays are likely to persist for days. Weston Corneth has more. The ground stop may have been lifted, but the chaos and disruption from this outage will last well into the weekend and perhaps even into early next week. Thousands of flights have been delayed or canceled. Planes and crew are out of position. Some aircraft have been diverted to nearby airports because their destination airports were at capacity. Amtrak, the national train company here in the United States, was reporting also seeing slowdowns on its website and app from people looking for alternatives. The data company, Sirius, estimates 1.5 million passengers have been affected. By this outage and the magnitude of this crisis means the Trump administration is already dealing with some serious questions. Authorities are blaming aging technology. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy says essentially the problem came from overloaded routers that began transmitting inconsistent data, which forced authorities officials to shut the system down. He is calling for $50 billion in emergency funding to replace this aging infrastructure and warns that without a complete overhaul, More disruptions like this could happen. What will happen in the future?