One router at one site grounded every US flight: FAA outage was a config flood
emax · x · 2026-11-15
New details on the FAA nationwide ground stop: no cyberattack, no SMART involvement — the FAA found zero evidence of either.
- While replacing an end-of-life copper line with fiber at one remote FAA site, L3Harris crews triggered a router that began flooding the network with 1,000+ connection attempts every 4–5 seconds
- Radar feeds and radio links to aircraft went unstable; after 45 minutes of not knowing why, the FAA grounded the entire country
- Isolating that single site restored everything
Author emax adds historical context: in 1999 at MIT, a cascading network misconfiguration took down all of MITnet — an otherwise extremely robust network — forcing the head network admin (nicknamed "god") to manually intervene and reconfigure core routers one by one.
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