WASHINGTON — The Federal Aviation Administration lifted its nationwide ground stop on Friday night, clearing departures to resume after a telecommunications outage at air traffic control centers held flights on the ground for more than four hours and stranded thousands of travelers.
“The safety of the flying public is always the FAA’s highest priority,” the agency said in a post on X. “The FAA lifted the ground stop and some flight departures are resuming.” The agency told passengers to contact their airlines for flight updates.
“Before clearing flights to resume, we thoroughly tested our systems to confirm they were stable and that operations remain reliable.”
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the airspace reopened at 8:15 p.m. ET, and the Air Traffic Control System Command Center’s cancellation advisory followed at 8:19 p.m. Even with the stop lifted, Duffy warned that tens of thousands of travelers could remain stuck at airports overnight and that schedules would take time to recover, Reuters reported.
By Friday night, more than 6,600 flights had been canceled and 8,600 delayed, according to FlightRadar24 figures reported by Reuters. More than 1.5 million passengers had been scheduled to depart U.S. airports on roughly 11,000 flights after 4 p.m. ET, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium.
How the shutdown unfolded
Trouble began around 3:30 p.m. ET, when radar and communications at the centers that handle high-altitude traffic grew unstable; Duffy put the start at 3:36 p.m. The FAA’s Advisory 111 took effect at 3:54 p.m. ET, ordering all departing traffic to remain on the ground until further notice and citing “extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety.”
Duffy said at the time that a communication issue was “impacting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers.” He later blamed the failure on the agency’s aging network, saying its switches and routers were overloaded with data and shut down, Reuters reported.
The disruption spread beyond U.S. borders. At the FAA’s request, Eurocontrol, the European air traffic management organization, suspended U.S.-bound departures from its 42 member states for flights departing between 5 p.m. and midnight ET, according to a Eurocontrol advisory.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said preliminary indications showed no sign of a “nefarious attack” behind the outage.
It was the first nationwide ground stop since January 2023, when a failure in the FAA’s pilot notification system paused departures for nearly two hours. Airlines began restarting operations on Friday night, but American Airlines said it expected residual delays and cancellations to extend into Saturday.
Also Read: FAA Orders Nationwide Ground Stop Over Communications Issue