India, Nov. 14 -- Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy on Saturday suggested that an FAA contractor might be to blame for Friday's telecommunications outage, as per his remarks at a press briefing at Transportation Department headquarters. The outage grounded flights across the country and led to thousands of cancellations.

According to Duffy, "in at least one of our remote FAA locations, a contractor was doing routine maintenance to switch telecommunication lines from old copper wire, and they were bringing it over to fiber."

Duffy named the contractor as L3Harris. "That contractor that does the work for us is L3Harris. They're our legacy provider," he said. He added that officials are still trying to figure out what went wrong.

"Was i...