FAA lifts nationwide ground stop after communications failure disrupts flights

The Federal Aviation Administration announced a nationwide ground stop on Friday afternoon after a communications failure at air-traffic control centres, prompting the cancellation of more than 6,600 flights and delaying about 8,600 others, according to FlightRadar24. The order was lifted at 8:15 p.m. Eastern Time (0115 GMT), and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said U.S. airspace is now operational, though departures will resume gradually.

Airlines began resuming limited services later that night. Delta, United, American and Southwest each posted updates indicating they were restarting flights and urging passengers to check the status of their itineraries. Duffy said the immediate problem had been fixed and that flying was safe, but warned that a broader modernization of the aging air-traffic control system was needed. He attributed the outage partly to insufficient funding and called for $50 billion to upgrade the system.

European departures bound for the United States were suspended until early Saturday morning per a notice from Eurocontrol, while some flights to Europe were allowed to depart from U.S. airports. In Australia, U.S.-bound flights were held on the tarmac for several hours pending clearance from the FAA.

Officials from the Department of Homeland Security, including Secretary Markwayne Mullin, said there was no evidence the outage resulted from a cyber-attack. The incident marks the longest nationwide grounding since the September 11, 2001 attacks and the second such ground stop since January 2023.