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BY Rebecca Heilweil and Max Ufberg

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U.S. airlines are still reeling from a nationwide ground stop issued on Friday that interrupted weekend travel and wreaked havoc on schedules. The culprit, the Federal Aviation Administration says, was simply outdated tech.

The ground stop was followed by eager speculation on social media about what might have caused the issue. Some pointed a finger at a new AI system that the FAA integrated earlier in the week; others blamed foreign adversaries. At the same time, a range of tech companies that contract with the FAA, like Microsoft,were quick to distance themselves from the agency’s problems.

Later Friday evening, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told reporters the outage occurred after an old analog system called time-division multiplexing became overloaded. This is an arcane system of processing data signals over a network.…