Across the United States, from Chicago to San Francisco, Boston to Burbank, travelers reported being stuck on the tarmac due to a rare nationwide groundstop that was issued by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Friday.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy confirmed on X on Friday afternoon that the FAA has “issued a nationwide ground stop for all U.S. airports following a communication issue impacting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers.”
Secretary Duffy stated that the FAA was investigating the issue.
News agency Axios and other outlets reported that the FAA has issued the rare nationwide groundstop due to what the agency described as “extraordinary circumstances” and “reasons of safety.”
“All departing traffic should remain ground stopped until further notice,” the FAA advisory stated, adding that “inbound international flights will be managed on a case-by-case basis.”
ABC News and other media organizations detailed that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told reporters that the government is investigating and that “there was no indication as of yet that this was a nefarious attack against us.”
He told reporters that “it’s just a telecommunications outage as of now,” adding that “this isn’t another 9/11. I cannot repeat that enough.”
The impact of the outage on flights
More than 10,000 flights across the United States have already been delayed as of press time, according to flight tracking site FlightAware, which reported that 1,948 flights had been canceled as of press time, numbers that appeared to be growing by the minute as the groundstop continued.
As of 4 p.m. ET, there were still some 11,000 flights scheduled to depart from U.S. airports on Friday, according to aviation analytics company Cirium.
“We are monitoring developments related to a full groundstop in the U.S.,” Cirium stated.
Previous groundstops
The last time the FAA issued a nationwide groundstop was in 2023, when a computer outage brought the country’s aviation system to a standstill. The order went into effect early on the morning of January 11, 2023, and was lifted several hours later that same day.
The 2023 groundstop was due to an outage in what is known as the Notice to Air Missions system (NOTAMs), a pilot communication system.
Prior to that, the last nationwide groundstop occurred following the September 11th attacks in 2001.
