U.S. air travel was still disrupted on Sunday after a nationwide ground stop on Friday grounded nearly all departing flights for almost five hours, the longest such halt since September 11, 2001. FlightAware counted about 9,200 flights canceled and about 7,500 delayed on Friday. On Saturday more than 6,400 flights were canceled and more than 8,000 delayed as of 9:35 p.m. ET, and 875 Sunday flights were already canceled. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said he expects operations to largely return to normal by late Sunday, apologized for the disruption, and said the system remains stable.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the halt followed routine maintenance by FAA contractor L3Harris at a remote facility, where a newly installed router fired more than 1,000 connection attempts at other routers every four to five seconds, overwhelming air traffic control communications centers and disrupting some radar feeds. Seventeen of the FAA’s 22 en route centers were affected. Bedford said: “No facilities went dark. Nothing was fully lost.” Officials said there is no indication of a cyberattack, and Duffy said it is not yet determined whether installer error or a faulty router was to blame. He called for $50 billion to upgrade air traffic control, after Congress approved $12.5 billion last year. Delta, United and American each canceled about 25 percent of their Saturday flights and JetBlue nearly 45 percent, Reuters reported, and airlines issued rebooking waivers. The figures are as of Saturday evening and this is a developing story.
The photograph in this video is a file photo of an airport departure board during an earlier wave of cancellations (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0). It does not show this weekend’s disruption. The other screens are original Zark News graphics.
Full story: https://zarknews.com/u-s-air-travel-still-disrupted-sunday-after-longest-nationwide-ground-stop-since-9-11/
Sources: Reuters; FlightAware; Federal Aviation Administration • November 15, 2026. File photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Zark News illustration.
