Latest. The failure began with a contractor’s routine upgrade job, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said at a Saturday briefing. L3Harris, a longtime FAA contractor, was changing copper wire to fibre at a remote FAA location when an error started flooding other routers in the air traffic control system, and the FAA is still investigating whether it was user or installer error by L3Harris or a faulty router that was installed, Duffy said; the routers in these facilities were manufactured in 2001, he added, and L3Harris did not immediately respond to NPR’s request for comment. The FAA’s acting chief technology officer, Rebecca Guy, said the agency saw two places pinging its network at a very high rate, a thousand connections every four to five seconds, disabled both right away and stabilised the network, and is now doing a root cause analysis. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said there was no evidence of anything nefarious or AI related, and that airline partners believed they would have full schedule integrity by the close of business on Sunday. FlightAware counted nearly 25,000 flights delayed and over 9,000 cancelled on Friday, with more than 4,000 cancellations recorded on Saturday morning, NPR reported.
Latest. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on Saturday that all FAA systems are back to “full operations” after the hours-long outage on Friday evening that grounded air traffic across the United States, Axios reported. Duffy reiterated his plea to Congress to fund upgrades to the nation’s air traffic control equipment, saying proper upgrades could have prevented the ground stop. The declaration covers the FAA’s own systems; airline schedules were still recovering on Saturday from the aircraft and crew displacement the stop left behind.
Latest. The disruption ran into a second day on Saturday. FlightAware counted more than 3,400 cancellations and more than 6,200 delays as of early Saturday, CNBC reported, against the roughly 700 Saturday cancellations counted on Friday night, and Axios put Saturday’s cancellations at 3,000 as airlines worked through the backlog left by the stop. The FAA said on Saturday that some flight departures were resuming and that, before clearing flights to resume, it had thoroughly tested its systems to confirm they were stable and that operations remain reliable. The Southeastern Conference said some of its college football games had been moved to Sunday because of the disruption, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said teams travelling on charter flights could receive priority.
Latest. The stop’s Asia-Pacific spillover reached Hong Kong, where Cathay Pacific said two Hong Kong bound flights from the United States, CX807 from Chicago and CX879 from San Francisco, were disrupted after departing on Friday local time, and that it was looking after those passengers with hotel accommodation overnight. The airline said all its remaining flights to and from the United States on Saturday were operating as scheduled, but warned that delays on some flights would occur as air traffic control and airport authorities cleared the congestion left by the ground stop. In Washington, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin also ruled out any connection between the failure and the Microsoft outage that had affected services worldwide, saying investigators had seen no attacker chatter or footprints, while adding that agencies were still checking and had ruled nothing out, AFP reported.
Latest. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy put a clock time on the reopening and a mechanism on the failure. Airspace reopened at 8:15 p.m. Eastern, more than four hours after the 3:54 p.m. order, and the outage was caused by switches and routers that became overloaded with data and went down, Duffy said, adding that there was no total loss of communications or radar. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said there was no cyberattack linked to the stop and the public was never in danger. FlightRadar24 counted more than 4,700 flights cancelled and 10,000 delayed on Friday, with about 700 more already cancelled for Saturday, and Cirium counted at least 827 flights diverted by 7:05 p.m. Eastern, 670 of them returning to their departure airport. Duffy called for $50 billion in upgrades, corroborating the figure TASS reported earlier in the evening, warned the restart would be slow, and said he expected operations back to capacity by the Thanksgiving travel period; analysts said restoring schedules could take days.
Latest. The stop reached Australia on Saturday local time, where US bound flights out of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane were grounded or delayed, The Guardian reported. Brisbane Airport said four flights were delayed and none had been cancelled as of 2:00 p.m. Saturday; in Melbourne, a Dallas flight scheduled for 10:00 a.m. departed at around 1:00 p.m., shortly after the US ban was lifted, and a Los Angeles flight was delayed by almost three hours, while Sydney Airport said it was monitoring the nationwide stop closely and told passengers travelling to or via the United States to check with their airline.
Latest. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy used a White House press conference after the failure to ask Congress for $50 billion in emergency funding to replace the air traffic control equipment, TASS reported, up from the $30 billion modernization request reported a day earlier. “We have just witnessed what vulnerabilities and outdated systems lead to,” Duffy was quoted as saying. “This is an emergency. I want Congress to allocate us emergency funding. I need $50 billion.” Duffy also said President Trump had declared the situation a national emergency, according to TASS; no other outlet in the feed queue had reported the $50 billion figure or the declaration at the time of this update.
Latest. The FAA lifted the nationwide ground stop on Friday night, Deutsche Welle reported, hours after the order halted departures at every US airport. FlightAware put Friday’s cancellations at more than 4,500, with about 700 more already cancelled for Saturday and over 10,000 flights within, into or out of the United States delayed, and Cirium expected further cancellations among the roughly 11,000 flights that had been scheduled to depart after 4 p.m. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy called the failure a legacy network problem, pointing to old switches, old routers and 1980s copper lines. NAV Canada said it was applying traffic management measures at Toronto Pearson, Montreal-Trudeau, Calgary and Vancouver to manage traffic volumes, and warned travellers to expect delays. Deutsche Welle gave no clock time for the lifting and did not report whether the suspended departures from Europe had resumed.
Latest. The halt spread across the Atlantic on Friday night. Eurocontrol, the European air navigation safety organisation, said departures of passenger aircraft from European countries to the United States were suspended because of the technical failures on the American side, in a notice Interfax reported early on Saturday Moscow time. The suspension was taken at the FAA’s request and was planned to run until 8:00 a.m. Moscow time, which is midnight Eastern.
Latest. The disruption count climbed through the evening: FlightAware put the number of US flights delayed or canceled at more than 11,000, The Guardian reported, and the ground stop was still in force in its latest report, with no timeline given for how long the stoppage might last. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said there was no clear information on duration and that nothing was being ruled out on the cause.
Latest. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told reporters at the White House that there was no indication the failure was an attack on the United States, calling it a telecommunications outage, and said every flight had been accounted for and everybody was safe. NAV Canada said it was monitoring the stop closely, that there was no impact on Canadian operations, and that it continued to support traffic in Canadian airspace, including any diverted aircraft. No announcement that the stop had been lifted had been published by the time of this update.
The Federal Aviation Administration halted departures at every airport in the United States on Friday afternoon, issuing a national ground stop after a communications failure disrupted the control centers that manage aircraft in flight. The Air Traffic Control System Command Center issued Advisory 111, titled “National Ground Stop,” at 3:54 p.m. Eastern. “Due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety, attention all aircraft operators, by order of the Federal Aviation Command Center all airports are ground stopped,” the advisory said. “All departing traffic should remain ground stopped until further notice. Inbound international flights will be managed on a case by case basis.” Reporting on the advisory put its effective window through 11 p.m. Eastern.
In a separate statement, the FAA said a communications issue affecting multiple Air Route Traffic Control Centers was to blame and that agency technicians were investigating. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, posting at 4:16 p.m. Eastern, described it as “a communication issue impacting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers” and said the agency would provide updates as it had them. Neither the FAA nor the department named a root cause, and officials did not say whether a cyberattack was suspected.
The failure built through the afternoon. Problems were reported from about 3:30 p.m. Eastern at the Kansas City center before spreading, and an earlier advisory, Advisory 107, had already stopped flights bound for Chicago O’Hare from 3:10 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. Eastern, citing an equipment outage and communications issues. Flightradar24 counted about 3,100 aircraft airborne and bound for US airports at 4:19 p.m. Eastern, with no additional aircraft taking off under the order. Flights already in the air could still land and remained in contact with controllers, according to ABC News reporting carried by AirlineGeeks.
Nationwide stops of this kind have happened only twice since the September 11, 2001 attacks grounded US aviation: on the day itself and on January 11, 2023, when a failure of the NOTAM safety notice system halted departures for about an hour and a half. Friday’s failure is different in kind, a communications breakdown at the en route centers rather than a notices database fault, and its duration was still unclear at the time of writing. The FAA’s public status board no longer listed a nationwide halt at about 4:30 p.m. Eastern, but the agency had issued no statement confirming a full resumption, and reported end times for the advisory varied. Even if departures resume quickly, a Friday afternoon stop of this breadth leaves aircraft and crews out of position across every US airline network, with cancellations and delays expected to run into the weekend.