TRUMP: OUTDATED EQUIPMENT REASON FOR FLIGHT SUSPENSIONS

WASHINGTON, NOVEMBER 14 /SRNA/ - US President Donald Trump acknowledged that the suspension of flights at airports across the country could be linked to outdated equipment.

Trump said the problem was not caused by a cyberattack or artificial intelligence, Fox News reported.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said that the failure of US air traffic control equipment was caused by outdated technology and that Congress must allocate 50 billion dollars to replace it.

"Our routers were overloaded with data and started showing inconsistencies in the data, so we shut down the system," he said.

Duffy stressed that the Trump administration had been asking Congress since last year to fully fund the construction of an entirely new air traffic control system.

According to the latest data from FlightAware, a website that tracks air traffic, the number of delayed or cancelled flights in the United States due to the system failure has exceeded 15,000, TASS reported.

According to its data, 8,501 flights within, to, or from the United States were delayed, while 7,218 were cancelled.

Earlier, the US Federal Aviation Administration /FAA/ grounded flights at airports across the country for approximately four and a half hours due to problems with air traffic control equipment.