FAA back at "full operations" after Friday outage, Transportation Sec. says

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Saturday that all FAA systems are back to "full operations" after an hours-long outage Friday evening that grounded all air traffic across the U.S.

The big picture: Duffy reiterated his plea to Congress to fund upgrades to the nation's air traffic control equipment, explaining that proper upgrades could have prevented the ground stop.

Driving the news: Duffy explained that the outage was caused when a contractor performed routine maintenance on a telecommunications line to upgrade a copper wire to fiber-optic cable and install a new router."It was such an old wire that it was being discontinued, meaning that line was going to get shut down.

So we had to switch it over from old copper," Duffy said.Duffy said it's unclear whether the outage occurred because of contractor error or faulty equipment, but they are working to figure that out.

FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford warned that up to 5,000 flight cancellations will remain throughout today, but airlines have assured the agency that they should return to normal operations by the end of the day Sunday.

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