Washingtin DC: The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Friday lifted a nationwide ground stop imposed following a major communications system failure at air traffic control centers, which disrupted thousands of flights and left tens of thousands of passengers stranded across the country.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced that US airspace had reopened at 8:15 p.m. Eastern Time (0115 GMT), nearly four hours after the disruption forced the suspension of departures nationwide. However, he cautioned that flight operations would return to normal gradually.
“It’s going to be slow,” Duffy told reporters at the White House, warning that airlines would need time to clear the backlog and restore their schedules.
According to FlightRadar24, more than 6,600 flights were canceled and another 8,600 delayed, while approximately 1,500 additional cancellations had already been recorded for Sunday. Aviation analysts warned that the disruption could have a cascading impact on airline operations for several days.
Duffy said tens of thousands of travelers were left stranded at airports across the country as airlines struggled to manage the widespread disruption.
Explaining the cause of the outage, the transportation secretary said the problem began at 3:36 p.m. when air traffic control centers experienced instability in their radar and communications systems.
Critical data-handling switches and routers became overloaded, resulting in inconsistent information being transmitted through the network. The FAA subsequently ordered a nationwide halt to departures as a precautionary measure.
“Our switches, our routers actually got overloaded with data and they started to give us inconsistencies in the data from those routers and because of that we shut the system down,” Duffy said.
He clarified that air traffic controllers never completely lost radar or communications capabilities and were able to safely guide thousands of aircraft to their destinations during the disruption.
While the immediate technical issue had been resolved and authorities maintained that flying was safe, Duffy stressed that the incident highlighted the urgent need to modernize the country’s aging air traffic control infrastructure.
He blamed Congress for failing to provide sufficient funding for a comprehensive overhaul and called for $50 billion to upgrade the system and prevent similar disruptions.
“What we have is an incredibly old air traffic control system,” Duffy said, urging lawmakers to provide the necessary funding. “Give us the money to fix it.”
Earlier on Friday, before the disruption, the White House and the Department of Transportation had called on Congress to approve $30.1 billion for improvements to the nation’s aging airports and air traffic control infrastructure.
Meanwhile, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said investigators had found no evidence so far suggesting that the outage was caused by a cyberattack or an unauthorized artificial intelligence system. However, he said both possibilities remained under examination.
“It appears this was mechanically driven, however, we’re still looking,” Mullin said.
The National Security Agency is assisting the Department of Homeland Security with the investigation, he added.
The incident marks the most significant nationwide aviation shutdown since the September 11, 2001, attacks. The only other nationwide ground stop imposed by the FAA since then occurred in January 2023, when a computer system failure grounded domestic departures for approximately 90 minutes.
Flight Operations Gradually Stabilise
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) says flight operations across the US are gradually returning to normal, with aircraft resuming departures. However, passengers may continue to face delays and cancellations as airlines adjust schedules and reposition aircraft and crew to support the recovery.
