US blames outdated technology for nationwide flight disruption

We have an incredibly old telecommunication system and so here's what we believe happened yesterday. In at least one of our remote FAA locations, a contractor was doing routine maintenance to switch telecommunication lines That contractor that does the work for us is L3Harris. from old copper wire and they They're our legacy provider. They've been working for the FAA for over 20 years. were bringing it over to fiber. And the network that we use at the FAA to control the airspace, L3Harris actually owns that network. Now, the work happening was due to the age of the copper wire that we were replacing. It was such an old wire. That it was being discontinued, meaning that line was going to get shut down. So we had to switch it over from old copper. We had to bring it over to fiber, going from TDM to IP or from analog to digital. So what we're working to determine was whether we had incompetence, meaning was it user error or installer error from L3 Harris? Or did they install a faulty router? We haven't determined what the fault was. Was it the router or were they not doing great work for us at L3 Harris? 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 gave us issues with our communication with airplanes.