The Federal Aviation Administration lifted a rare four-hour nationwide ground stop on all departing U.S. flights at 8:15 p.m. EST on Friday, November 13, 2026, after a telecommunications outage disrupted air traffic control centers across the country. The halt left thousands of flights grounded and triggered more than 10,000 delays and over 4,000 cancellations on Friday, according to flight-tracking service FlightAware.
The FAA ordered the nationwide ground stop around 3:54 p.m. EST on Friday, citing “extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety” after communication trouble affected all 22 Air Route Traffic Control Centers, which direct high-altitude traffic between airports across the United States. Shortly before the national order went into effect, the agency had placed both major Chicago airports, O’Hare International and Midway International, under ground stops because of an equipment outage.
Roughly 3,100 aircraft bound for U.S. airports were already in the air when the halt began, according to FlightRadar24. In its alert, the Air Traffic Control System Command Center ordered all departing traffic held on the ground until further notice while managing inbound international flights on a “case-by-case” basis. Throughout the afternoon stoppage, international flights departing from the East Coast were still permitted to fly over the Atlantic Ocean, while southbound flights from Jacksonville, Houston, Miami and San Juan were cleared over the Gulf and the Atlantic, and San Francisco International Airport received clearance for Pacific-bound departures at 3 p.m. PST.
What caused the FAA ground stop
During a Friday night news briefing, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy attributed the stoppage to aging infrastructure and network hardware that buckled under heavy traffic. “What we have is an incredibly old air traffic control system,” Duffy said, explaining that after routers became overloaded with data, “they started to give us inconsistency in the data from those routers.” Because of that inconsistency, Duffy said, the agency shut the system down. Multiple sources told CBS News earlier on Friday that an update to the private communications network connecting America’s air traffic control system caused it to reboot, leading to a crash and communications outage. That private network is operated by defense contractor L3Harris, which did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The White House and the Department of Homeland Security stated that there was no sign of a cyberattack or foreign interference. Speaking to reporters outside the White House on Friday, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said there was no indication of a threat or a “nefarious act” against the United States, calling the incident a telecommunications outage across the FAA and confirming that all airborne planes were accounted for and landing safely. “I don’t want to say that this is a crisis, but it is because we’re … we had to do a nationwide ground stoppage,” Mullin said. Both Mullin and Microsoft confirmed that the FAA failure was unrelated to Thursday’s 18-hour global Microsoft 365 and Outlook outage, according to Northeastern Global News.
The outage also followed a recent software expansion across the agency’s control facilities. On November 10, three days before Friday’s halt, the FAA completed the rollout of an artificial intelligence air traffic management tool called the SMART system across all 22 Air Route Traffic Control Centers under an $875 million contract awarded in June to Air Space Intelligence, Al Jazeera reported. Air Space Intelligence denied any involvement in a social media statement on Friday, saying, “The 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.”
How the outage affects weekend US flights
Friday’s order was only the third nationwide ground stop in U.S. aviation history, following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and a January 2023 outage in the FAA’s Notice to Air Missions pilot-alert system that was later traced to contract workers unintentionally deleting computer files. Former National Transportation Safety Board chair Robert Sumwalt, who spent 24 years as an airline pilot and was flying on September 11, told CBS News that a nationwide stoppage of this scale was hard to fathom in the modern era. In Canada, Transport Minister Steven MacKinnon offered his country’s assistance to the FAA, including accommodating U.S.-bound aircraft if needed, while Nav Canada reported normal operations and Air Canada canceled all remaining Friday evening flights to and from the United States. Within the U.S., passenger rail operator Amtrak reported higher-than-normal call volumes as stranded travelers looked for rail alternatives.
Although airspace reopened at 8:15 p.m. EST on Friday, Duffy cautioned travelers at airports to check directly with their airlines because departures would resume slowly and depend on available flight crews. Airlines had already preemptively canceled several hundred flights for Saturday, November 14, compounding a backlog that followed nearly 7,000 U.S. flight delays on Thursday. Duffy said the FAA would work to move as many flights as possible Friday night within crew duty-time limits. “If not, we’re going to start tomorrow [Saturday] morning with our airline partners moving those aircraft. But it’s going to take us some time to unwind what’s happened this afternoon,” Duffy said, adding that he expects operations to recover ahead of the peak Thanksgiving holiday travel period.