The US Secretary of Transportation, Sean Duffy, on Saturday, November 14, at a press conference at the headquarters of the US Department of Transportation in Washington, DC, announced that he believes that Friday's disruption of the country's air traffic control system was not caused by a cyber attack.
When asked about the possibility of a cyber attack or foreign intervention, Duffy said: "We don't believe so." He explained that after disconnecting the current activity at one of the centers remote from the network, all the systems were activated again.
The US Secretary of Transportation emphasized: "This disruption was related to one of the Federal Aviation Administration's systems, which could not respond to the conditions."
He added that improper performance by the contractor or equipment failure could have been the deciding factor for the systems.
This disruption occurred on Friday, November 13, when the network was upgraded from copper cables to fiber optics. According to Duffy, one of the routers that was supposed to be replaced was sending a large amount of data to other routers on the network, causing a disruption in the system.
Duffy said investigators are looking into whether the disruption was caused by a contractor error when installing the equipment or a technical defect in the routers.