FAA Lifts Nationwide Ground Stop that Disrupted Thousands of Flights, White House says no Indication of “Nefarious Act”
By Kierra Frazier, Nicole Sganga, Faris Tanyos
A rare nationwide ground stop on all departing U.S. flights that lasted several hours Friday has been lifted, and flights are resuming, the Federal Aviation Administration said. Officials said the issue stemmed from a “telecommunication outage.”
“At 8:15 tonight, Eastern time, we’ve opened up the airspace,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said during a news briefing Friday night. “Now does that mean every flight is going to fly right now? It’s going to be slow. So if you’re watching, you’re at an airport, check with your airline.”
In a social media post following the briefing, the FAA said that “before clearing flights to resume, we thoroughly tested our systems to confirm they were stable and that operations remain reliable.”
The FAA had issued the ground stop on all departing flights due to “extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety.” The ground stop lasted about five hours.
Duffy attributed the ground stop to outdated air traffic control technology and routers overloaded by data.
“What we have is an incredibly old air traffic control system,” Duffy said during the news conference. ” … Our routers actually got overloaded with data and … they started to give us inconsistency in the data from those routers. And because of that, we shut the system down.”
“The FAA lifted the ground stop and some flight departures are resuming,” the FAA confirmed in a social media post following the briefing. “Before clearing flights to resume, we thoroughly tested our systems to confirm they were stable and that operations remain reliable.”
An update to the private communications network that connects America’s air traffic control system caused the system to reboot, leading to a crash and a communications outage, multiple sources told CBS News earlier Friday. The system is operated by L3Harris, which did not immediately respond to CBS News’ request for comment.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in Friday’s briefing that new security patches introduced into the older system appeared to “overwhelm” its routers.
Duffy said the FAA would try to move as many flights as possible Friday night depending on crew capacity.
“If not, we’re going to start tomorrow [Saturday] morning with our airline partners moving those aircraft. But it’s going to take us some time to unwind what’s happened this afternoon,” Duffy said.
There were more than 10,000 delays and over 4,000 cancellations listed Friday, according to the flight tracking website FlightAware.
Duffy said he thinks flights will be “back up and operational as we come into the heat of travel” during the Thanksgiving holiday later this month.
See airline traffic during the nationwide ground stop
This map shows airline traffic during the nationwide ground stop on Nov. 13, 2026. The stop began around 3:54 p.m. ET when there was about 2,500 airliners in the sky. One hour into the stop, airline traffic had been roughly cut in half. Two hours in, airline traffic was down to about 700 planes. The stop ended at around 8:15 p.m. ET. Click on the play button below to see the traffic over time.
Data through Nov 13, 8:59 PM ET
Note: Includes only aircraft types that were built for passenger service, including Boeing, Airbus and regional jets. Aircrafts are classified by their ICAO type code, not by who operates them. A cargo 767 or a government 737 counts as an airliner, while business jets, light aircraft, helicopters and military-only types are excluded.
Chart: Grace Manthey and Matt Clark / CBS News • Source: OpenSky Network, ADS-B Exchange
Mullin told reporters in an earlier briefing outside the White House Friday that “there was no indication, as of yet, that this was a nefarious act against us. It was just a telecommunication outage, as of right now.”
“There is no indication, we had no reason to believe, that as of right now, that this was a threat to the United States,” Mullin said. “This was a telecommunication outage throughout FAA. Out of an abundance of caution, we have grounded all the flights. And all the flights are accounted for.”
Mullin reiterated Friday night that there was no cyberattack and the ground stop was not related to the massive global Microsoft outage.
“I want to make sure everybody understands that there is no connection between this and Microsoft,” Mullin said during the news briefing with Duffy. “I know a lot of people are making that jump. This is so far what we’ve seen. There is actually no cyberattack. We’re still working through that process.”
He also said flights will be able to land safely.
Passengers wait at San Francisco International Airport during a nationwide ground stop for all departing flights on Nov. 13, 2026.
“We are assured that everybody is safe. Everybody that’s going to be in the air, that’s currently on the plane, the loved ones, as I said, we’re going to get you on the ground and we’re doing it in a safe manner,” Mullin said.
Federal agencies are all working together on the situation, Mullin added.
“I don’t want to say that this is a crisis, but it is because we’re … we had to do a nationwide ground stoppage,” he said.
According to the flight tracking site Flightradar24, there were about 3,100 airborne aircraft bound for U.S. airports when the ground stop began.
Delays began piling up at major airports across the country in Boston, Atlanta, Miami, Pittsburgh, New York City, Los Angeles and Baltimore.
“This is absolutely unprecedented,” said Robert Sumwalt, a former chair of the National Transportation Safety Board and a CBS News transportation safety expert. “I was an airline pilot for 24 years. I was in the air on 9/11. That was the last major ground stop. There was one back in 2023 for just a few hours. This is absolutely unbelievable that this could happen in this day and age.”
On Friday night, Duffy renewed his call for Congress to approve emergency funding to modernize the nation’s air traffic control system.
“But you will have more of these,” Duffy said during the news conference. “You will have more of them unless the American people and the Congress tell us to build.”
Mullin argued that the incident demonstrated why he believed piecemeal modernization was insufficient and said the Trump administration wants a complete replacement of the air traffic control system, at an estimated cost of $50 billion.
The FAA Telecommunications Infrastructure, known as FTI, is the communications backbone that connects air traffic control centers and other FAA facilities. It supports the transmission of essential voice communications and operational data used to manage air traffic.
The FAA awarded Harris Corp., the predecessor to L3Harris, a contract to modernize, operate and manage the network in July 2002, more than 24 years ago.
A November 2023 FAA-commissioned safety review described the FTI network as obsolete and said it depended on an older communications technology known as TDM.
The review also warned that the technology was no longer supported by the telecommunications infrastructure on which it relied and that an unexpected failure could leave individual FAA facilities, or even an entire regional air traffic control center, disconnected from the broader network.
In January 2023, a nationwide ground stop was ordered for a few hours, and domestic flights were delayed nationwide due to an FAA system outage. The FAA said at the time that its flight personnel alert system went down overnight.
