US Lifts Nationwide Ground Stop After Hours-Long Halt to All Airport Departures

On Friday, the Federal Aviation Administration told every airport in the United States to hold its departing flights, and it kept that order in place for hours. The agency has since lifted the nationwide ground stop, but the effects of the halt are still working their way through the system.

The FAA's first notice said all departing traffic should stay grounded until further notice. It described the stop as a response to "extraordinary circumstances and reasons for safety," and blamed a temporary telecommunication outage. It also said every flight had been accounted for, and that international flights would be handled case by case. The halt was ordered, the agency said, out of an abundance of caution.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy gave the first public description of the fault in a post on X. He said a communication issue was affecting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers, and that FAA technicians were investigating. Later, speaking to reporters at the White House, he put the blame on aging equipment. "We have old switches, old routers, we use 1980s old copper lines," he said, calling it a legacy network problem.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin addressed the question many travelers would ask. He said there was no indication that the breakdown came from a cyberattack or from artificial intelligence, and that the public was never in danger.

The numbers show the scale of the disruption. FlightAware counted more than 4,500 flights canceled on Friday and about 700 canceled for Saturday. More than 10,000 flights within, into, or out of the United States were delayed. This was the first nationwide ground stop since January 2023, when the FAA dealt with a system outage. Before that, the last one came after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.

Lifting the order does not put schedules back in order. Many airlines have planes and crews out of position after the halt, and Duffy was blunt about the recovery. "It's going to be slow," he told reporters. Officials said they expect the system to be back to normal in time for Thanksgiving on November 26, one of the busiest travel periods in the country.

The timing carries its own weight. The day before the halt, Duffy and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought sent a letter to Congress asking for $30 billion to modernize the air traffic control system. They wrote that the money would complete the modernization of the national airspace, providing a resilient telecommunications backbone for controllers, modern hardware and software, new control towers, and upgraded airport infrastructure.

The effects reached beyond US borders. Eurocontrol had said all flights from its 42 member states bound for US airports were suspended at the FAA's request, though it later removed that note from its website. It urged airlines to issue delay notices for flights that had been unable to take off. NAV Canada said it was monitoring the situation and applying traffic management measures at Toronto Pearson, Montreal-Trudeau, Calgary, and Vancouver. It said its own systems were operating normally and told travelers to expect delays and check with their airlines.

What to watch now is how quickly airlines can reposition aircraft and crews, whether the FAA gives a fuller technical account of the outage, and how Congress responds to the $30 billion request before the Thanksgiving rush.