00:00I want to talk about what actually happened yesterday. Now, those of you who are aviation
00:06reporters have heard me talk about a decades-old air traffic control system, and it's not just
00:12old equipment. We have an incredibly old telecommunication system, and so here's what
00:18we believe happened yesterday. In at least one of our remote FAA locations, a contractor was doing
00:25routine maintenance to switch telecommunication lines from old copper wire, and they were bringing
00:31it over to fiber. That contractor that does the work for us is L3Harris. They're our legacy provider.
00:38They've been working for the FAA for over 20 years, and the network that we use at the FAA to
00:45control
00:45the airspace, L3Harris actually owns that network. Now, the work happening was due to the age of the
00:55copper wire that we were replacing. It was such an old wire that it was being discontinued, meaning
01:03that line was going to get shut down. So we had to switch it over from old copper. We had
01:09to bring
01:09it over to fiber, going from TDM to IP or from analog to digital. Now, I want to be clear.
01:17This work has
01:18been happening in America for decades. Virtually every single institution in America has gone from
01:25copper to fiber, from analog to digital. I just maybe the FAA is the last one to be doing this
01:30work because
01:31the investments haven't been made. But this is not complicated. It's pretty straightforward work that we
01:38were doing yesterday at again, a very remote location. So what we're working to determine was whether we had
01:46incompetence, meaning was it user error or installator error from L3Harris, or did they install a faulty router?
01:56We haven't determined what the fault was. Was it the router or were they not doing great work for us
02:02at L3Harris?
02:04Either through contractor error or a faulty piece of equipment, that router that was being replaced as we switched
02:11from copper to fiber. It started flooding other routers in our air traffic control system. So specifically,
02:20we had over 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds. And what that did was gave us issues
02:29with our communication with airplanes, and it also caused some disruption with our radar feeds.
02:38And when we see that, your safety is paramount. We shut down the airspace. And we do it safely. We
02:46get you on
02:46the ground. And then we work on isolating the problem and then opening the airspace back up, which is what
02:55we did
02:56yesterday. And as we get more information, we'll give this to you. But I think it's pretty clear. A lot
03:04of questions came in
03:05yesterday. Was this a cyber attack? Did some foreign nation attack this network? And the answer to that is, we
03:16don't believe so.
03:17Once we were able to isolate the work that was being done at this remote location, all of our systems
03:22came back online. So we don't believe this was cyber at all.
03:27This was an FAA system that didn't meet the moment. Our contractor didn't meet the moment, or the equipment didn't
03:37meet the moment and caused the outages.
