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A single malfunctioning FAA router in rural Arkansas appears to have caused the air travel chaos that grounded all flights across the US Friday, according to a new report.
The problem originated at an FAA radio site in El Dorado, Arkansas, where a newly installed router flooded the network with excessive data traffic, disrupting communications between pilots and air traffic controllers, the Wall Street Journal reported.
“We saw two places that were actually pinging our network at a very high rate, a thousand connections over every four to five seconds,” Rebecca Guy, the FAA’s technology chief, said on Saturday.
The outage affected 17 of the FAA’s 22 high-altitude control centers, forcing officials to issue a nationwide ground stop.
More than 3,500 flights were grounded during the roughly five-hour shutdown.
Officials are investigating whether defective equipment or installation errors by contractor L3Harris caused the failure.
El Dorado is a city of about 22,000 people some 210 miles northeast of Dallas.
Another router in Amarillo, in the Texas panhandle, is also being eyed as contributing to the outage.
The FAA states that there was no evidence of a cyber attack.
