The Federal Aviation Administration ordered every departing flight in the United States to stay on the ground on Friday afternoon, November 13, after a telecommunications failure struck the air traffic control centers that guide planes between airports. It was only the third nationwide ground stop in American history — and the first since a computer failure halted flights in January 2023.
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| File photo: Commercial aircraft parked on a tarmac. The FAA's order halted every departing flight at every US airport on Friday afternoon. |
What Happened Friday Afternoon
The order came from the FAA's Air Traffic Control System Command Center at 3:54 p.m. Eastern Time. In Advisory 111, titled "National Ground Stop," the agency wrote: "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. All departing traffic should remain ground stopped until further notice."
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy confirmed the stop on X at 4:16 p.m., saying it followed "a communication issue impacting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers," the regional facilities that manage aircraft at cruising altitude across large sections of the country. He said FAA technicians were investigating the problem.
The order covered departures only. Planes already in the air were not told to land and were allowed to continue to their destinations. International flights heading into the United States were handled on a case-by-case basis, according to the FAA advisory.
The nationwide order did not come out of nowhere. About half an hour earlier, the FAA had halted departures at Chicago O'Hare International Airport over an equipment outage, with Chicago Midway following minutes later. Then, at 3:54 p.m., the stop went national.
By early evening, the FAA began letting planes go in stages. A follow-up advisory at 5:46 p.m. said the ground stop remained in effect but that departures would be released in phases as each regional control center recovered. At San Francisco International Airport, flights bound for Hawaii and Asia were cleared to depart from 3 p.m. Pacific Time. By about 6:55 p.m. Eastern, the FAA's status board no longer showed a nationwide ground stop in force, though delay programs remained at several airports. An update at 8:30 p.m. Eastern reported that the ground stop had been lifted.
Why the FAA Stopped Every Departure
The official explanation, consistent across the FAA, the Transportation Department, and the Department of Homeland Security, was a telecommunications outage: the systems controllers use to communicate failed across the control centers at the same time. CBS News reported that the communications network connecting the air traffic control system had undergone an update and later rebooted, and that the FAA's telecommunications structure rebooted and crashed, triggering the outage.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin briefed reporters outside the White House on Friday and addressed the fear directly. He said a "telecommunication outage throughout FAA" prompted the nationwide stop, adding: "We're wanting to assure all the American people, this isn't a safety [threat] to the American people or another 9/11." He said there was "no prior indication as of yet that this was nefarious attack against us" and that "it's just a telecommunication outage as of right now." Officials also said no planes currently in the air were without communications.
The FAA has not said when the telecommunications problem will be fully fixed, and it has given no estimate for a complete return to normal operations. Its advisory listed a window running through 11:30 p.m. Eastern on Friday, but officials stressed that the order itself ran until further notice, not to a fixed time.
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| File photo: Passengers look at a departure board showing cancelled flights. More than 10,000 US flights were delayed on Friday, according to FlightAware. |
The Scale of the Disruption
Friday was a full travel day, and the stop hit at one of the busiest hours of the week. About 26,284 flights were scheduled to depart from US airports on Friday, according to aviation analytics company Cirium, with roughly 11,000 of them set to leave after 4 p.m. Eastern, carrying more than 1.5 million passengers.
By about 7 p.m. Eastern, FlightAware had counted 10,243 delays and 3,535 cancellations of flights within, into, or out of the United States. An earlier Associated Press count at 6 p.m. put the figures at more than 10,000 delayed and 2,500 canceled. The numbers were still climbing as the evening went on.
Some of the country's busiest airports were among the hardest hit. New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport, Boston Logan, and San Francisco International were singled out in reporting, and the FAA's own status dashboard showed ground stops stacked up at JFK, Las Vegas, Newark, Philadelphia, and Seattle. Boston Logan's official account confirmed that the FAA was permitting some transatlantic flights to depart.
The disruption spread beyond the United States. Canada-US flights were held or delayed at airports across Canada, even though Canadian air traffic systems were never affected, according to reports. The ripple reached well beyond holiday travelers, too. College football teams traveling for Saturday's games were stranded: Tennessee and Texas returned to campus, and Auburn switched to traveling by bus, while the Southeastern Conference said it was closely monitoring the situation. Democrats closing out a post-election gathering in Denver also saw their travel plans scrambled, according to USA Today.
A White House official said President Donald Trump was receiving constant updates on the ground stop, though he had not publicly commented on it as of Friday evening.
A Rare Move With Only Two Precedents
Nationwide ground stops of all departures have happened only twice before in US history. The first was on September 11, 2001, when the FAA ordered every aircraft in the country to land after the terrorist attacks. The second was on January 11, 2023, when the FAA's Notice to Air Missions system, known as NOTAM, failed, halting departures nationwide for less than two hours.
The January 2023 episode is a useful warning about what comes next. The ground stop itself lasted under two hours, but the travel chaos lasted much longer. By late that night, FlightAware had recorded 8,783 delays and 1,276 cancellations, and airlines were still recovering the next day. It took eight days before the FAA revealed that contractors had unintentionally deleted files while fixing a synchronization problem between the NOTAM database and its backup.
Friday's incident is different in an important way. In 2023, the FAA had to restore a pilot-notification database. This time, the outage hit communications at multiple Air Route Traffic Control Centers, the facilities that manage planes traveling between airports. Identifying the affected system does not necessarily explain why it failed, and the FAA has said only that its technicians are investigating.
The timing added to the strain. The stop came just one day after the longest government shutdown in US history ended on November 12, after 43 days, according to reports. An FAA order cutting domestic flights was still in force, with the cuts scheduled to step up from 4 percent of flights to 10 percent on November 14.
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| File photo: An air traffic control tower. The outage hit the communications systems linking the FAA's regional Air Route Traffic Control Centers. |
What This Means
The ground stop exposed how much of American air travel depends on a small number of aging communications links. When the systems that connect regional control centers failed at the same time, the FAA's only safe option was to stop departures everywhere, because controllers could not reliably hand planes off from one center to the next.
For travelers, the practical lesson is that a ground stop is not the same as a cancellation. Many of Friday's delayed flights were expected to depart late rather than not at all, but the backlog will take time to clear. Airlines must reposition aircraft and crews that ended the day in the wrong cities, and delays and cancellations typically ripple into the following day, as they did after the January 2023 stop.
What Happens Next
The FAA's next scheduled update was expected at 11 p.m. Eastern on Friday, and the agency has said it will provide updates as its technicians work through the problem. The immediate question is whether the telecommunications failure is fully fixed or whether further outages could force another stop.
Beyond that, the incident is likely to draw scrutiny in Washington. Lawmakers and aviation experts will want to know what update or reboot caused the failure, why it spread across all of the country's control centers at once, and what safeguards exist to prevent a repeat. The January 2023 failure produced a full investigation and a public explanation eight days later; Friday's outage, which hit a broader part of the system, is likely to face at least as much scrutiny.
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