US transportation chief says airspace now ‘opened up,’ blames ‘old hardware’ for travel chaos

By Agencies Today, 4:10 am

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US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy gestures during a news conference in the James Brady Briefing Room of the White House in Washington, November 13, 2026. On the right is US Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

The United States has lifted an hours-long ground stop at the nation’s airports, with top officials explaining that the disruption was not due to a cyberattack or a sweeping Microsoft outage.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy says that US airspace is now “opened up,” and blames “old hardware” for the travel chaos. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin tells reporters there is “no cyberattack” and “no connection between this and Microsoft.”

“Our switches, our routers, actually got overloaded with data… They started to give us inconsistency in the data … and because of that, we shut the system down,” Duffy says at a White House briefing, adding it had intermittent communication and intermittent radar.