FAA Says L3Harris Owns the Network Involved in the Nationwide Ground Stop

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Federal Aviation Administration chief Bryan Bedford said Saturday that Friday’s nationwide ground stop began during routine work at at least one remote FAA site where contractor L3Harris was moving a telecommunications connection from copper to fiber. Duffy said L3Harris has worked for FAA for more than 20 years and owns the network FAA uses to control the airspace.

Duffy said a router involved in the work began flooding other FAA routers with more than 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds. Reuters reported that the instability reached 17 of FAA’s 22 en-route centers, affecting communications with aircraft and some radar feeds. Officials said isolating the maintenance work brought the systems back online.

Reuters described a nearly five-hour shutdown and reported that more than 20,000 flights had been disrupted since Friday. Those are Reuters’ reported impact figures, not a final FAA audit. DOT said 3,500 aircraft were airborne when the stop began and more than 8,000 flight operations resumed after it was lifted.

L3Harris responded Saturday that it, its telecommunications partners and FAA have completed more than 70% of the planned airspace-communications conversion from legacy copper wires to fiber. The company said it takes the disruption seriously and is supporting the investigation. Its statement did not identify the initiating fault or admit responsibility.

The formal FAA record says Advisory 005 cancelled the nationwide stop at 8:19 p.m. Eastern Friday. Duffy separately said the airspace reopened at 8:15 p.m.; the advisory supplies the authoritative cancellation time.

The new record sharpens the accountability question. According to Duffy, a private contractor owns the national telecommunications network involved, and routine work at at least one remote site propagated instability across most en-route centers. FAA should explain what contract, supervision and technical controls govern a vendor-owned safety-critical network.

That explanation should include the change-control plan, predeployment testing, network segmentation and rate limiting, rollback procedure, redundant paths, failover performance, contractor oversight and any outage penalties. FAA should also publish the final root-cause analysis and corrective actions.

There is material contrary evidence. The copper line was being discontinued, so the migration was necessary; systems recovered after FAA isolated the work; officials found no evidence of a cyberattack; and L3Harris reports substantial conversion progress. Investigators still have not determined whether installer or user error, a faulty router or another technical failure initiated the flooding.

The network has a documented earlier national failure. A June 2010 Transportation Department inspector general review said a November 19, 2009 FAA Telecommunications Infrastructure outage grounded hundreds of flights and delayed thousands of travelers.

The inspector general found that contractor network-configuration and procedural errors caused the 2009 outage, blocked about 75% of FTI traffic and delayed restoration for five hours. It also found that FAA oversight could have been more effective and proactive. Those findings are an oversight precedent, not evidence that the same errors caused the 2026 event.

The 2010 review also said FAA and Harris retired the precise legacy-network/router design involved, repaired the alerting problem and took corrective actions. FAA’s panel recommended automated router configuration and independent verification, testing changes on a model network, better end-to-end monitoring, and staffing and incentive reviews. Those records do not show that these controls failed in 2026. Separately, a September 2022 SAM.gov notice shows FAA then intended a single-source extension of the L3Harris FTI contract for continuity; it does not establish current terms or prove that no later competition occurred.

Bedford also said this routine replacement on the legacy telecommunications network was not part of the Peraton-FAA $12.5 billion modernization effort. DOT separately said it has replaced 69% of copper communications under its broader modernization work, while L3Harris’s statement describes more than 70% completion of its planned airspace-communications conversion. Those are different claims and should not be merged.

The broader governance context still matters without proving that the Brand New Air Traffic Control System caused the outage. The Government Accountability Office found that FAA lacks a comprehensive documented lifecycle cost estimate and an integrated phase-one master schedule for that initiative, and counted 11,389 project schedules that were not integrated.

The strongest supported criticism is not that L3Harris negligence, copper wiring or the modernization program has been proved as the root cause. It is that routine work on a vendor-owned national safety network propagated instability to 17 of 22 centers while key technical, contractual and supervisory controls remain undisclosed. The final incident record should show how FAA will prevent one maintenance event from again becoming a national shutdown.