Five-hour House hearing on airspace outage ends without finding root cause
MANILA, Philippines — Only one thing was clear after five grueling hours of often repetitive questions from lawmakers part of the House of Representatives Committee on Transportation: No one still knows what actually caused the New Year’s day airspace outage.
Transportation officials present during the hearing on Wednesday said they were still waiting for the interagency panel investigating the outage to wrap up its probe.
They reiterated that they are still waiting for government cybersecurity officials to finish their forensic examination of the circuit breaker that supposedly failed, causing the system failure that affected at least 56,000 passengers rushing to get home after the holidays.
Cybersecurity officials said it may take up to six weeks for them to finish their examination, while transportation officials said a report from the interagency panel may come out by next week.
To recall, transportation officials also told senators last week that they were still waiting for the forensic findings of the Cybercrime Investigation and Coordination Center, an attached agency of the Department of Information and Communications Technology.
It has been 17 days since the airspace outage, which was initially blamed on faulty uninterruptible power supply units, but the progress of investigations as to what ultimately caused it has been slow.
House transportation panel chairperson Rep. Romeo Acop (Antipolo City) said that while their briefing on the airspace fiasco was adjourned, a separate legislative investigation may happen after session resumes on January 23.
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