FAA lifts nationwide ground stop after more than four hours as Duffy blames old routers overloaded with data

The Federal Aviation Administration lifted its nationwide ground stop at 8:15pm Eastern on Friday, more than four hours after halting all departures from US airports over what it called a "temporary telecommunications outage". FlightAware counted more than 8,800 cancellations to or from the US on Friday, and about 2,650 more flights were cancelled for Saturday by early morning.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told a White House briefing that the FAA saw "instability for our radar and our communications in our centers" and shut the system down. "Our switches, our routers, actually got overloaded with data," he said, then corrected himself: "I shouldn't say they went down. They started to give us inconsistency in the data." He described the system as "analog telecom" and called for $50 billion from Congress: "This is an emergency."

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said there was "no indication, as of yet, that this was a nefarious act against us", no cyberattack and no connection to Microsoft's outage. He said new security patches added to the older system appeared to "overwhelm" its routers. CBS News reported, citing multiple sources, that an update to the private network linking air traffic control caused a reboot and a crash.

What markets now expect

Traders put the chance that the US government officially blames a hack at 4.6%, a foreign actor at 3% and Iran at 1.3%. Each needs a public, on-the-record statement from US officials. Suspicion or "not ruled out" does not count. The three have more than $50,000 traded each.