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WASHINGTON — Democrats are demanding answers about Friday’s temporary ground stoppage on all flights in the United States and the apparent communications issue that affected air traffic control centers.

The ground stop crippled air travel and raised a variety of questions about the nation’s aging air traffic control systems.

In an interview on Friday, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Torrance) said the FAA telecommunications outage was completely unacceptable and that the agency needs to create systems that do not have a single point of failure.

“I urge the FAA and the Trump administration to make sure this never happens again,” he said.

The California congressman said there need to be congressional hearings on the cause of the technical issue and what improvements should be enacted to avoid similar future outages.

“What just happened is enormously damaging to trust in our air system,” he said, “and our air system is a vital component of our national economy.”

Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), the ranking Democrat on the Aviation, Space and Innovation Subcommittee, said she will be demanding answers from the FAA about the ground stop.

“The safety of our skies is built on redundancies,” she said in a statement. “Whatever led to the nationwide ground stop will warrant a thorough and complete investigation.”

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont)—who was stranded at Denver International Airport because of the outage—told CNN that lawmakers were waiting to be briefed by the Trump administration Friday afternoon.

Earlier in the day, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said that it was a telecommunications outage and that the ground stop did not constitute a national security threat.

“There is no indication that we’ve had, no reason to believe, that as of right now this was a threat to the United States,” Mullin told reporters at the White House, later repeating there was “no indication as of yet that this was a nefarious attack against us.”

While the outage has not been linked to a specific cause yet, federal officials are not yet ruling out the possibility that it could be tied to the use of an AI tool that advises air traffic controllers to assist in managing air traffic across the nation’s airspace.

The FAA expanded the use of the tool to all of its 22 control centers on Tuesday, according to the agency. The tool—called Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories, or SMART—combines about 200 data streams, including flight paths, schedules and weather, on one cloud-based system, according to a fact sheet posted on the FAA’s website.

Congressional Democrats raised concerns after the platform’s initial roll-out in the Washington area, calling for a 90-day pause until they better understand how it is being used. In a letter to Secretary Duffy, lawmakers said there was an “egregious lack of transparency” about the tool.”

“The air traffic control systems and processes currently in place are complex, and we don’t know what impact AI-enabled tools might have on these systems and resulting safety,” they wrote in October.

But in a post on social media Friday afternoon, the AI company that created SMART, Air Space Intelligence, said that “current ground stop is not based on or a result of the SMART system, any product of ASI or our integration with FAA and ATC.”

A string of hoax alerts causing flight diversions across Europe this week have broadened to include newsrooms.

A new series of bomb threats caused more flight diversions across Europe on Friday, while also expanding to target a number of media organisations.

British broadcaster Sky said it was one of a number of newsrooms that received a bomb threat. “We have carried out a security assessment and reported the matter to the relevant authorities,” a spokesperson said.

Bulgaria’s Nova TV and the Irish public broadcaster RTE received emailed bomb threats from a purported “Mikhail Andropov”, headlined “Message to the West”, portraying the threats as a prelude to more disruptions across Europe.

RTE briefly evacuated staff, including radio and television presenters, in Dublin after an email was received on Friday morning. RTE Radio One presenter David McCullagh later told listeners that the threat warned that a bomb would explode within 45 minutes.

The Irish government said hoax bomb claims were also sent to Virgin Media, Newstalk radio and The Irish Independent newspaper and that it was unclear who was behind them.

“However, these threats come on the heels of the ongoing disruption to aviation around Europe caused by similar threats, and it seems likely that this is a coordinated campaign of disruption,” it said in a statement.

The incidents come a day after hoax bomb threats disrupted more than two dozen flights across Europe on Thursday, and days after other aircraft and a cruise ship received bomb alerts.

‘Hoax threats’ increasing

On Friday, jets escorted airliners flying from Brussels to Sofia and from Prague to Bucharest and Cyprus through Hungarian airspace due to bomb threats, Hungarian Defence Minister Romulusz Ruszin-Szendi said.

He also said NATO had ordered an air patrol near the Hungarian-Romanian border, the first report that the Western defence alliance had become involved.

Danish police said threats were directed at traffic at Copenhagen airport but that there appeared to be no danger to passengers. The airport said it was “operating normally”.

Czech police registered bomb threats to nine flights departing from or arriving in Prague. An airport spokesperson said no flights had been ⁠⁠cancelled as a result.

France said four new bomb threats were made to aircraft flying over French territory, and that all landed safely.

A Ryanair flight from Rome landed as scheduled in Lisbon, CNN Portugal reported.

About half a dozen ‌‌flights were disrupted on Tuesday and more than two dozen on Thursday, some of them making unplanned landings or being escorted to their destinations by fighter jets.

Al Jazeera’s Frances Read, reporting from London on Friday, said that while the threats have not been credible so far, disruptions appear to be widening.

“The number of hoax threats this week is making governments sit up and take notice about where this might be coming from and also think of solutions for how to deal with it,” she said.