The United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has lifted a nationwide ground stop that halted departing flights across the country for more than four hours on Friday, after a telecommunications outage hit air traffic control centres. The stop was ordered at 3:54pm Eastern Time and lifted at 8:15pm, with Transport Secretary Sean Duffy confirming that airspace had reopened.
The FAA said in a post on X during the outage: “There has been a temporary telecommunications outage — out of an abundance of caution all flights have been halted. Every flight has been accounted for and international flights will be handled on a case by case basis.” The outage affected all 22 air route traffic control centres, which guide aircraft between airports. Duffy said switches and routers had become overloaded with data, causing unstable radar communications, but stressed there had been no total loss of communications or radar capability. Flights already in the air were allowed to land, and 4,042 aircraft were airborne when the order was issued, according to Flightradar24.
More than 10,000 flights were delayed and over 4,000 cancelled on Friday, according to FlightAware, with around 700 more Saturday flights already cancelled. Airlines warned it would take time to get aircraft and crews back into position, and disruption was expected through the weekend. It was the first nationwide ground stop since January 2023, when a computer system failure halted flights. Officials said there was no indication of a cyberattack or any threat: Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said there was no evidence the outage was “a nefarious attack against us”, and the FBI does not believe a cyberattack or criminal activity caused the failure, Bloomberg reported. Duffy blamed the legacy air traffic control network and urged Congress to approve $50 billion to modernise it, saying he expected operations to be back up before the Thanksgiving travel period. Flights within Alaska and Hawaii were not affected, and Air Canada cancelled all of its flights to and from the United States.
Sources: Al Jazeera, ‘US flights resume after FAA lifts hours-long nationwide ground stop’, 14 November 2026 — https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/11/13/us-grounds-all-flights-after-communication-issue ; Al Jazeera, ‘FAA ground stop lifted: Why were US flights grounded, and what’s next?’, 14 November 2026 — https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2026/11/14/faa-ground-stop-lifted-why-were-us-flights-grounded-and-whats-next ; The Indian Express (AP), ‘US flights resume after communications outage grounds planes for hours’, 14 November 2026 — https://indianexpress.com/article/world/us-news/us-flights-resume-after-hours-grounded-faa-communications-problem-10962449/ ; WVLT (AP), ‘Nationwide ground stop lifted, FAA says’, 14 November 2026 — https://www.wvlt.tv/2026/11/13/live-nationwide-ground-stop-issued-due-extraordinary-circumstances-faa-says/
Photo: Airman 1st Class Imani West, U.S. Air Force (public domain), via Wikimedia Commons
