FAA Halts All US Departures After Air Traffic Communications Outage
The FAA stopped departures at every US airport Friday after a telecommunications failure hit regional air traffic control centers. Thousands of flights were disrupted.
The Federal Aviation Administration stopped departures at every airport in the United States on Friday afternoon after communications problems hit several of the regional centers that guide planes across the country. It was the first nationwide ground stop since January 2023, and it delayed or canceled thousands of flights during one of the busiest travel stretches of the week.
The FAA said it acted “due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety.” Departing traffic was to stay grounded “until further notice,” and flights already in the air were allowed to land, according to an agency alert reported by TechCrunch. Inbound international flights would be handled case by case, the agency said.
What happened
An FAA spokesperson told TechCrunch that the ground stop followed “communication issues impacting multiple Air Route Traffic Control Centers.” These centers manage high-altitude traffic between airports, and there are 22 of them nationwide. On X, the agency called it a “temporary telecommunications outage” and said it halted flights out of an “abundance of caution,” CNBC reported.
MPR News, Minnesota’s public radio newsroom, reported that the FAA saw radio frequency and radar outages at several regional control centers. An internal Alaska Airlines message seen by CNBC also blamed communications and radar problems. Flight-tracking service Flightradar24 said the cascading shutdown played out over about an hour, according to The War Zone, a defense and aviation news site.
The disruption was immediate. An MPR News journalist on a plane preparing to take off at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport reported that departures were halted, and the pilot told passengers he had “never seen this before.” Jeff Lea, a spokesperson for the Metropolitan Airports Commission, which runs that airport, said about 170 scheduled departures there were affected and called it “a fluid situation at every U.S. airport.”
Across the country, flight-tracking firm FlightAware counted nearly 7,000 flights delayed or canceled by mid-afternoon, MPR News reported. Cirium, an aviation data company, told CNBC that roughly 11,000 flights had been scheduled to leave US airports after 4 p.m. Eastern time. The FAA alert covered a window running until 11 p.m. Eastern on Friday.
No sign of an attack, officials say
Federal officials moved quickly to play down fears of sabotage. Markwayne Mullin, the US secretary of homeland security, told reporters at the White House there was “no indication yet that this was a nefarious act,” TechCrunch reported. “This was a telecommunication outage,” he said, according to MPR News.
At a later briefing, Mullin said communications had been degraded but not completely lost, which is why aircraft could keep landing, The War Zone reported. He said two areas of the country were not affected but did not name them. He also warned that the repair would take “some time” and would not be finished within the hour. He rejected comparisons to the September 11, 2001, attacks, the only other time besides 2023 that US air traffic was halted nationwide. Mullin said President Donald Trump had been briefed.
CNN, citing two law enforcement officials, reported that early signs pointed away from a cyberattack and that FBI personnel were monitoring the situation, according to The War Zone. Officials stressed that those findings were preliminary.
Sean Duffy, the US transportation secretary, wrote on X that “FAA technicians are investigating the issue.” The cause had not been identified by Friday evening.
Questions about aging technology
The outage came the same week the government expanded an artificial intelligence traffic-management tool for air traffic controllers to all 22 regional centers, after a rollout around Washington, D.C., in September. TechCrunch said it was unclear whether the two were connected. Air Space Intelligence, the aviation technology company tied to that tool, said the problem had nothing to do with the AI deployment, The War Zone reported.
The failure also renews attention on the condition of the air traffic control system. In September, Duffy warned that the telecommunications network behind it runs on architecture about 40 years old. That month, a circuit failure at a Philadelphia facility and a fiber cable cut by a construction crew near New Brunswick, New Jersey, caused widespread delays across the Northeast, Reuters reported at the time.
Steve Arroyo, a former United Airlines pilot and aviation analyst, told MPR News that Friday’s event looked like that September outage, only nationwide. He said it could be linked to outdated equipment, and that planes have to stay on the ground when controllers cannot talk to them.
What comes next
Even after departures restart, the effects are likely to spread. CNBC noted that disruptions tend to grow the longer a ground stop lasts, because pilots and flight attendants run up against their maximum legal duty hours, which strands crews and planes out of position. United Airlines said it “will work with our customers to get them to their destinations once this issue is resolved.”
Airport officials urged travelers to check flight status directly with their airlines. The FAA said it would provide updates as technicians work to restore full communications.
