After a full-day halt triggered by technical failures in air traffic control systems, the U.S. resumed domestic flights on Friday evening. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ended the nationwide ground stop at 8:15 p.m. Eastern Time, as Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy confirmed airspace reopening.
According to FlightRadar24, over 6,600 trips were called off and 8,600 were held up, with an additional 1,500 scheduled for Sunday.
Duffy warned that flight operations would resume gradually as airlines worked to restore their schedules following the disruption. “It’s going to be slow,” he told reporters at the White House. Tens of thousands of passengers were stranded at airports nationwide as a result of the disruption.
Duffy also confirmed that he and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin had met with President Donald Trump at the Oval Office to discuss the incident. Explaining the cause of the disruption, Duffy said the problem began at 3:36 p.m. when air traffic control centres experienced instability in their radar and communications systems.
According to him, switches and routers became overloaded with data, resulting in inconsistencies in information transmitted through the network and prompting authorities to shut down the affected system. “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,” he explained.
Even though the disruption was widespread, Duffy said air traffic controllers never fully lost radar or communications and safely landed thousands of planes. He said the immediate technical problem was fixed and flying was safe, though he emphasized the need to upgrade the country’s aging air traffic control infrastructure.
Air Traffic Control Infrastructure
The Transportation Secretary blamed inadequate congressional funding for delays in modernising the system and called for $50 billion to overhaul the infrastructure. Earlier on Friday, before the disruption occurred, the White House and the Department of Transportation had urged Congress to approve $30.1 billion for upgrades to the nation’s ageing airports and air traffic control infrastructure.
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Meanwhile, Mullin said there was no evidence so far that the incident resulted from a cyberattack or a rogue artificial intelligence system, although investigators had not ruled out either possibility. “It appears this was mechanically driven, however, we’re still looking,” he stated.
Two airline officials said the disruption appeared to have affected a telecommunications network operated by L3Harris Technologies, which handles critical radio frequencies used by air traffic controllers to communicate with pilots. The National Security Agency was working with the Department of Homeland Security on the investigation.
Passengers Stranded Nationwide
Among those affected was 50-year-old Edward Kargbo, from West Chester, Pennsylvania, who was scheduled to travel on a 9 p.m. Ethiopian Airlines flight to Lomé, Togo. Following the disruption, Kargbo said he would spend the night at the airport ahead of a rescheduled departure at 6 a.m. on Saturday. “I have to squat the night here,” he said. “I’m stranded.”
Also affected was 47-year-old Louise Maher, whose British Airways flight from Newark to London was caught up in the disruption. “I might cry at some point but not yet,” she said. US airlines will not be required to compensate affected passengers because the disruption resulted from an FAA system failure rather than circumstances within the airlines’ control.
The incident marked only the second nationwide ground stop since the September 11, 2001 attacks. As airlines worked to recover from the disruption, American Airlines announced that it was prioritising flights to smaller cities outside its major hubs, as well as international destinations, to reposition aircraft and crews and accelerate the restoration of normal operations.
History of Nationwide Ground Stops
The previous nationwide grounding occurred in January 2023, when the FAA suspended domestic departures for approximately 90 minutes following an outage involving its Notice to Air Missions system.
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