FAA lifts nationwide ground stop after four-hour air traffic control outage disrupts 15,000+ flights
What happened
The FAA issued a nationwide ground stop for all U.S. airports at about 4:00 p.m. ET on Friday, Nov. 13, after a telecommunications outage knocked out communications across all Air Route Traffic Control Centers, and lifted it around 8:15-8:30 p.m. ET after roughly four and a half hours. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the FAA began detecting instability in radar and communications systems at 3:36 p.m. ET, as aging analog switches and routers in the air traffic control network became overloaded with data. More than 10,000 flights were delayed and more than 5,000-6,000 canceled, with over 600 diverted — more than 15,000 flights impacted in total — and officials warned schedules would remain disrupted through the weekend. At a Friday-night White House press conference, Duffy blamed the legacy analog network, said there was no evidence of a cyberattack, and raised the administration's air traffic control modernization ask to $50 billion, up from $30 billion, with President Trump declaring the failures a national emergency.
Why it matters & what’s next are part of Pro, along with the audio summary.
Start your free 14-day trialWho’s affected
- U.S. airlines — Delta (DAL), United (UAL), American (AAL), Southwest (LUV), JetBlue (JBLU) — face weekend cancellations, crew and aircraft displacement, and rebooking costs heading into the Thanksgiving travel peak
- L3Harris (LHX), operator of the network tied to the outage, faces scrutiny over the failure
- Microsoft (MSFT) is marginally exposed only via the separate, now-stabilized 365 outage, which it said was unrelated.