On Wednesday, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg did not rule out a cyberattack as the cause of a major system outage that grounded all planes in the U.S. earlier in the day and raised new concerns among analysts and officials about vulnerabilities with the potential to cripple critical U.S. infrastructure.
“We’re not ready to rule that out,” Buttigieg told MSNBC when asked whether domestic or foreign actors had disrupted the Federal Aviation Administration’s system of sending safety information to pilots known as Notices to Airmen, or NOTAMs.
“There is no direct indication of any kind of extraterrestrial or nefarious activity,” he added, adding that the FBI is investigating the cause as well at the FAA’s direction.
But the secretary highlighted one key question that remains unanswered: “How is it possible to have this level of disruption?”
More than 4,000 flights were delayed and more than 600 canceled as of Wednesday morning due to a more than hour-long outage in the system that relays information to pilots about possible future incidents, and problems with other aviation systems. Disruption of traffic, such as planned military exercises or obstructions on airport runways. The system first began failing at 2 a.m. Eastern time, and the FAA ordered all domestic flights to be grounded until 9 a.m.
By the time Buttigieg spoke, flights had slowly resumed. But the gravity of the total seizure of American commercial air traffic prompted many with deep experience in defending against American adversaries to express new concerns.
“A national grounding of an airline may or may not be a cyber attack,” retired Navy Adm. James Stavridis, the former top official for operations in Europe, wrote on Twitter with a picture showing the grounded flights, “but even if it isn’t, it certainly shows us that One might look like. A good raised call.”
John Hultquist, a former US intelligence analyst now with the private intelligence firm Mandiant, expressed suspicion about a “horrific cyber conspiracy” as the root of Wednesday’s outage but added a serious warning.
“If you’re looking for cyber security angles I think this is it,” he wrote on Twitter. “We live in an increasingly complex, interdependent system that is vulnerable to unintended consequences and cascading failures.”
Buttigieg on Wednesday focused specifically on a series of redundancies built into the system, like most that help protect all commercial traffic, and why they failed.
“We need to understand why, with all those redundancies, it still got to the level that there had to be an hour-and-a-half-long ground stop and what kind of delay he saw,” he said.
Congress is currently in the midst of a five-year review of the FAA’s operations, and Buttigieg proposed a review of systems required, as well as other loopholes that allowed deep winter storms to strand hundreds of thousands of air travelers around the holidays.
U.N. The Civil Aviation Organization has already begun efforts to improve international systems that allow for prompt communication with pilots to adopt the clearer language and more reliable networks.