The Federal Aviation Administration stopped every flight departure in the United States on Friday afternoon after a telecommunications outage hit the control centers that guide planes between airports — only the third nationwide ground stop in 25 years. The order went out at 3:54 p.m. Eastern from the FAA's Air Traffic Control System Command Center, and it was blunt: “Due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety … all airports are ground stopped. All departing traffic should remain ground stopped until further notice.”
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the stop followed “a communication issue impacting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers” — the 22 regional centers that handle planes at cruising altitude between airports — and that FAA technicians were investigating. The FAA called it “a temporary telecommunications outage” and said: “Out of an abundance of caution all flights have been halted. Every flight has been accounted for.” About 3,100 aircraft were in the air bound for American airports when the order came; those planes kept flying and landed, while inbound international flights were handled case by case. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told reporters there was no indication of an attack, and that it was “too early to tell” how long the stop would last. Bloomberg reported that the FBI is examining whether a software update triggered the outage; that has not been confirmed by the FAA.
The cost of the afternoon mounted fast. By late afternoon, more than 7,800 flights across the country were delayed or canceled, Friday night's schedules were effectively wiped out, and airlines warned the disruption would ripple into Saturday as planes and crews sat stranded out of position.
As of Friday night, the nationwide stop remains in effect, and the FAA has not announced an end to it. The agency says flights will be allowed to depart as the en route facilities recover, released in stages through coordination with the Command Center; some San Francisco departures across the Pacific were cleared in the evening. The current advisory runs through 11 p.m. Eastern, when the FAA expects to issue its next update.
For travelers, the ground stop is the safety system doing its hard job: when the communications controllers depend on fail, the rule is to stop departures rather than fly blind. The deeper problem is the age of the system underneath — the FAA's telecommunications backbone is exactly what the administration's modernization push, including the $30.1 billion aviation funding request the Transportation Department backed this week, is meant to replace. Before Friday, the only nationwide ground stops in this century came after the September 11, 2001 attacks and on January 11, 2023, when a failure in the FAA's pilot-alert system halted departures for about 90 minutes.
📰 ProfiloPolitics Member News — choose your news, share it, earn credit:
https://white-curlew-963569.hostingersite.com
Never miss a story — Join our Telegram channel
Breaking U.S. political news, live as it happens — plus the stories the big outlets sit on.
Join ProfiloPolitics on Telegram