FAA telecom problems that triggered the ground stop were so alarming the White House situation room and national security apparatus went into action

Résumé détaillé

"I think we've all concluded that it's not a cyber issue."

The country is on edge as freezers and email go haywire, and the federal government wasn’t taking any chances either when the FAA saw a communications issue.

On Friday, the regulator ordered a nationwide ground stop for several hours, forcing airlines to delay and cancel thousands of flights, after a communications problem affecting air-traffic control was detected.

Officials said there was no evidence of a cyberattack or other nefarious activity, but the speed with which the telecom issue spread was alarming enough to briefly elevate it to the highest echelons of government.

During a press briefing on Saturday, FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said the White House situation room and the entire national security infrastructure were activated, noting that the FBI was also in facilities to investigate.

“I think we’ve all concluded that it’s not a cyber issue,” he declared.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said FBI Director Kash Patel, the director of national intelligence, and the Defense Department participated in a conference call because they were concerned there was a cyberattack from another country.

But they didn’t see any online chatter to indicate a hacking attempt, Duffy added. And once the FAA isolated the location where the telecom problem originated and took it offline, then the system began functioning properly again.

“We feel very comfortable that that was the root cause of the impact on our system,” he said. “It wasn’t a foreign actor.”

Still, cybersecurity has been top of mind lately. Hackers raised the temperatures in freezers across Europe and at U.S. military bases, making food go bad.

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