As of 8:50 p.m. ET on Friday, Nov. 13, flights in the United States are departing again after the Federal Aviation Administration lifted a nationwide ground stop that held every departing flight on the ground for more than four hours. The FAA ordered the stop after a communications failure hit the regional control centers that guide planes between airports across the country.
Update, 8:50 p.m. ET, Friday, Nov. 13: The FAA has lifted the nationwide ground stop. An FAA Command Center advisory issued at 8:19 p.m. ET cancelled the national ground stop for all airports, and the Associated Press reported that the FAA says airplane departures can resume. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the airspace reopened at 8:15 p.m. ET. The stop lasted more than four hours, from the order at about 3:54 p.m. ET until this evening.
Flights are resuming gradually, not returning to normal at once. Planes and crews are in the wrong cities, and delays and cancellations are expected to run into Saturday. As of 8 p.m. ET, more than 10,000 flights had been delayed and 5,000 had been canceled in the United States, according to FlightAware figures reported by NPR. Those counts were still rising and are not final full-day totals. The Associated Press, citing Cirium, reported at least 827 flights had been diverted as of 7:05 p.m. ET, with 670 sent back to the airport they left and 157 redirected to a different airport.
On the cause, Duffy told reporters at the White House that network switches and routers were overloaded and shut down after they began providing inconsistent data, and he called it a legacy network problem, saying the fix gives officials a pretty good indication that was the cause. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, speaking in the same briefing, said officials do not fully know what caused the outage yet and that there is no indication it was a cyberattack or a nefarious act. The FAA has not yet published a final statement naming a root cause. Travelers should keep checking their airline app before going to the airport.
Update, 8:20 p.m. ET, Friday, Nov. 13: The nationwide ground stop remains in effect and the FAA has not announced that it is lifted, given a timeline for lifting it, or changed the advisory window. The phased release of departures is continuing, and the FAA’s next update is still expected at 11 p.m. ET. The FAA’s status feed on Friday evening listed no airport-level ground stops, with ground delay programs at four airports and departure delays still building at Atlanta (about three hours) and Chicago O’Hare (about five hours). That board listing is not a lifting of the national order.
Cancellations jumped again in the last hour. More than 5,200 flights had been canceled and more than 9,000 delayed as of 8 p.m. ET, Fox Weather reported, up from 3,612 cancellations at 7 p.m. ET. Only 387 commercial flights were en route at 8 p.m. ET. Fox Weather described Friday’s stop as the second-longest nationwide ground stop in United States history, behind only the shutdown after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and now longer than the January 2023 stop, which lasted about 90 minutes.
Officials still have not named a firm root cause beyond the communications and telecommunications failure, and the FAA has not confirmed reports about a network update, a router problem or a software update.
Update, 7:20 p.m. ET, Friday, Nov. 13: The nationwide ground stop remains in effect and the FAA has not announced an end to it. The phased release is continuing: San Francisco International Airport said shortly after 7 p.m. ET that flights headed across the Pacific, including to Hawaii and Asia, have been cleared to depart, and Boston Logan said earlier in the evening that some transatlantic flights were being allowed to leave. Most departures remain held, and the FAA’s next update is still expected at 11 p.m. ET.
Cancellations climbed sharply in the last hour. FlightAware listed 3,612 cancellations and 10,243 delays for flights within, into or out of the United States as of 7 p.m. ET, CNN’s live coverage reported. USA Today, citing FlightAware at 6:40 p.m. ET, put cancellations at more than 3,000 and listed the hardest hit destination airports as Chicago O’Hare (173 flights), LaGuardia (143), Dallas-Fort Worth (132), New York JFK (113) and Boston Logan (104).
CBS News reported, citing multiple sources, that a network update triggered a reboot and crash in the air traffic communications system operated by L3Harris. The FAA has not confirmed that account, and officials still have not named a firm root cause beyond the communications and telecommunications failure.
Update, 6:50 p.m. ET, Friday, Nov. 13: The nationwide ground stop remains in effect, the FAA said in Advisory 120, issued at 5:46 p.m. ET, but flights will now be allowed to depart as the en route control centers recover, through coordination with the Air Traffic Control System Command Center. The advisory still lists a communications failure as the reason, runs through 11 p.m. ET, and says the FAA expects to issue its next update at 11 p.m. ET. The stop has not been lifted, and the FAA has not said when departures will fully resume.
By about 6 p.m. ET, FlightAware counted more than 10,000 delays and more than 2,000 cancellations among flights within, into or out of the United States on Friday, according to reports of its data by MarketWatch and other outlets. Shortly after 5 p.m. ET, the FAA said on X that there had been a “temporary telecommunications outage,” that flights were halted out of an abundance of caution, and that every flight had been accounted for. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told reporters there was no indication of an attack and that the outage would take some time to resolve. At the FAA’s request, Eurocontrol, the European air traffic management organization, also suspended U.S.-bound departures from its 42 member countries for flights leaving between 5 p.m. and midnight ET, USA Today reported. Officials still have not named a firm root cause beyond the communications and telecommunications failure.
The FAA issued the order at about 3:54 p.m. ET. Its advisory said all airports were ground stopped “due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety,” and that all departing traffic should remain on the ground “until further notice.” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the stop followed “a communication issue impacting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers,” and that FAA technicians are investigating.
A ground stop is an FAA order that keeps planes from taking off. Flights already in the air are not being ordered down; they can finish their trips and land. Planes on the ground cannot depart, and flights coming in from other countries are being handled one by one. A ground stop is a hold, not a cancellation. Airlines decide on their own whether to cancel, and long holds often turn into cancellations.
The FAA advisory lists an end time of 11:30 p.m. ET on Friday. That time is not a promise. The order itself says flights stay grounded until further notice, and the FAA has not said when normal departures will resume. Even when the stop lifts, flights will not return to schedule at once, because planes and crews will be in the wrong cities.
The trouble appeared first in Chicago. The FAA stopped flights headed to O’Hare at 3:10 p.m. ET and to Midway at 3:17 p.m. ET, citing an equipment outage, minutes before the national order. The Washington Examiner reported “rolling frequency outages” at control facilities, citing FAA employees, and the advisory also cited frequency problems across the national system. Late Friday afternoon, the FAA’s status feed showed departure delays building at Newark, Houston, Orlando and Phoenix, with O’Hare delays running 46 to 60 minutes and growing.
The FAA has not said how many flights or passengers are affected, and Friday’s full delay and cancellation counts were still being tallied late in the afternoon. About 25 minutes after the order, the tracking service Flightradar24 counted about 3,100 aircraft in the air and headed to U.S. airports, while no new flights were taking off.
At Washington Dulles International Airport, the region’s main international airport and a United Airlines hub, Friday evening departures were held under the same order as everywhere else. For Washington area travelers, it is the second hard day in a row. Storms on Thursday forced ground stops at Newark, New York JFK, Philadelphia, Boston and Dulles. FlightAware counted 1,021 canceled flights and 6,466 delays within, into or out of the United States on Thursday, according to trade reports of FlightAware data. The damage carried into Friday morning, when JFK saw 78 more cancellations and Delta and JetBlue had 89 canceled flights between them, with the total still rising.
A nationwide ground stop is rare. The last one came in January 2023, when a failure in the FAA system that sends safety notices to pilots halted departures nationwide. Before that, the only one was after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Reuters reported that Congress approved 12.5 billion dollars last year to fix the aging communications system, and that the FAA and the White House asked Congress on Friday for another 30.1 billion dollars for other air traffic fixes.
Travelers booked on Friday night or Saturday should check their flight in the airline’s app before leaving for the airport, and keep checking, because times can change more than once. Do not rely only on the airport departure board. Expect delays, and some cancellations, to run into Saturday even after the stop lifts, as airlines move planes and crews back into place.
Much is still not known. The FAA has not explained what exactly failed, beyond the communications and frequency problems described by officials. It has not said whether a fix is in place, whether the 11:30 p.m. window will hold, or when the national schedule will be back to normal.
This is a developing story, and Zark News will update it as the FAA and the airlines release new information.
