The Federal Aviation Administration lifted a nationwide ground stop on Friday evening, November 13, after a communications failure crippled air traffic control and halted almost all departing flights across the United States for more than four hours. The FAA ordered the stop at 3:54 p.m. Eastern, citing “extraordinary circumstances” and safety concerns, and lifted it at 8:15 p.m., clearing the way for airlines to resume operations.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the failure was caused by a data overload in the FAA’s network. “Our switches, our routers, actually got overloaded with data, and they went down,” Duffy said at a news conference. “They started to give us inconsistency in the data from those routers. And because of that, we shut the system down.” He said there was no total loss of communications or radar, but officials admitted that new technology being added to the network had overloaded older parts, causing intermittent gaps in communications and radar across all 22 high-altitude air route traffic control centres.
Thousands of Flights Hit
By the time the stop was lifted, more than 4,700 flights had been cancelled and around 10,000 delayed, according to flight tracking data reported by Al Jazeera. By 9:15 p.m., FlightAware showed almost 6,500 cancellations and some 8,800 delays in, out and within the US, with the totals still climbing as airlines worked through the backlog. Passengers woke up on Saturday to lingering disruptions, crowded terminals and improvised plans to reach their destinations, and officials warned that restoring airline operations would take time, with delays continuing for several days.
No Sign of a Cyberattack
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said officials had seen no evidence of a cyberattack. “We have seen zero evidence this is a cyber attack,” he said, although he added that he was not ruling anything out while the investigation continues. Bloomberg, quoting a person familiar with the matter, reported that the FBI does not believe a cyberattack or criminal activity caused the outage and is examining a software update as a possible trigger. The rare nationwide halt, only the third in US history, was the first full nationwide ground stop since a January 2023 software failure in the FAA’s Notice to Air Missions system, and it has renewed scrutiny of long-planned modernisation projects. With Thanksgiving travel looming, see Thanksgiving travel: American plans biggest day since pandemic, and for the other big tech failure of the week, Microsoft 365 outage drags into Friday as email still fails.
