US flight chaos: What caused FAA outage that grounded departures nationwide?

A telecommunications outage affecting regional air traffic control centres disrupted air travel across the United States on Friday, prompting the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to order a nationwide halt to flight departures.The outage was traced to a problem with network routers that cascaded across the country, according to the airline source. However, the precise cause of the communications failure remained unclear, with authorities continuing to investigate the incident.What caused the nationwide FAA communication outage?The problem originated with network routers and spread across the country, affecting communications at multiple air traffic control facilities, according to an airline source cited by CNN.The FAA ordered a nationwide ground stop after a telecommunications failure affected all 22 regional air route traffic control centres responsible for directing aircraft across the US.The disruption raised concerns over air traffic controllers' ability to communicate reliably with pilots, prompting the FAA to suspend departures as a precautionary measure.Transportation secretary…