The Federal Aviation Administration announced a rare nationwide ground shutdown Friday afternoon, in what appears to be a major outage affecting its air traffic control system.
Markwayne Mullin, the Homeland Security secretary, blamed the ground stop on a telecommunications outage but said Trump administration officials did not know the cause, adding that it would take a long time to resolve the problems. “This is not going to be solved and reversed in an hour,” he said. “It’s going to take time.”
Sean Duffy, the Transportation Secretary, confirmed the outage in a social media post, citing “a communications issue affecting all air traffic control centers.”
“FAA technicians are investigating the problem,” he added. “We will provide immediate updates as soon as we have them.”
The agency issued an advisory stating that “all airports are grounded,” citing “extraordinary circumstances and security concerns” as reasons.
“All departing traffic must remain grounded until further notice,” the official advisory said, adding that landings of incoming international flights would be handled on a case-by-case basis.
Shortly after the notice was posted, an FAA website listing air traffic control system notices appeared to have disappeared, erasing dozens of previously listed notices.
The shutdown, which began shortly before 4 p.m., could affect hundreds of flights already in the air, as well as planes on the ground waiting to take off. As of around 4:45 p.m., there were more than 7,800 delayed flights in the United States and about 350 cancellations, according to FlightAware, a flight tracking website.
More than 2 million people pass through airport security checkpoints daily, according to data from the Transportation Security Administration. As of Thursday, the agency screened nearly 2.5 million people. Due to delays and cancellations Friday evening, many passengers were kicked off their flights or told to return home.
According to FlightRadar24, an aviation tracking site, more than 1,000 planes were flying toward U.S. airports during the nationwide ground stop. According to flight tracking app Flighty, more than 30,000 departures and arrivals were planned for the rest of the day.
At least some of the airborne flights appeared to land in the middle of the shutdown. About half an hour after the ground stop was announced, planes could be seen landing at O’Hare International Airport.
But passengers waiting to take off were stuck in limbo.
At the Denver airport, passengers were removed from their flight along with their suitcases. A handful of them began rebooking their travel for the next day. But most were patiently waiting for any updates. A Southwest flight attendant announced that the airline expected an update in 30 minutes.
Before the advisory was issued, the FAA halted flights to Chicago’s O’Hare and Midway airports, citing equipment problems, and reported equipment-related departure delays at Newark, Las Vegas, Teterboro, Orlando, Houston and Phoenix.
Friday’s ground stop is only the third national moratorium on flights of this type in recent history. The FAA previously conducted nationwide ground checks on September 11, 2001, following the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York, and on January 11, 2023, due to a failure in the FAA’s system for alerting pilots to safety issues.
Here’s what else you need to know:
A busy month of travel: The ground stop will occur approximately two weeks before Thanksgiving, one of the busiest times of the year for air travel. On average, U.S. airlines are expected to carry about 2.7 million passengers each day during the holiday season, according to the trade group Airlines for America.
The last stop on the ground: The last nationwide ground stop occurred early in the morning of January 11, 2023 and lasted approximately 90 minutes. The disruption occurred after the failure of a system that alerts pilots of dangers in real time. Learn more >
Christine Chung, Niraj Chokshi, Lisa Lerer and Robert Chiarito contributed reporting.
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