US reopens airspace after flight disruption, rules out cyberattack

The United States reopened its airspace on Friday following an hours-long ground stop at the nation's airports. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy stated during a late-night White House briefing that the airspace had been opened as of 8:15 p.m. Eastern Time, though he cautioned that clearing the resulting travel chaos would be a slow process.

According to New Straits Times, the disruption was caused by old hardware, specifically switches and routers that became overloaded with data and went down. Officials ruled out a cyberattack and stated there was no connection to a sweeping Microsoft outage. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin dismissed speculation regarding a coordinated cyber assault.

The breakdown occurred one day after Duffy and the White House formally requested $30 billion from Congress to modernize and upgrade the U.S. Air Traffic Control System. Despite the disruption, Duffy insisted that flying remains safe for Americans.

Brief written by urgent.news from Punch, New Straits Times — 2 reports on this story. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.