FAA Halts Departures at All US Airports After Telecom Outage
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the US agency that oversees air travel, halted departures at all US airports on Friday afternoon and delayed landings. The stoppage began at about 4pm Eastern Time, and the FAA said it was caused by a temporary telecommunications outage.
The FAA calls this kind of pause a ground stop. In a statement posted on X, the agency said all flights had been halted out of an abundance of caution.
The action was only the second nationwide ground stop of all departures since the September 11, 2001 attacks. The first was in January 2023, when all domestic departures were paused for less than two hours. The FAA has more than 14,000 air traffic controllers, who handle more than 44,000 flights taking off from US airports each day.
The disruption was large. FlightAware, a flight-tracking service, reported 10,543 delays within, into, or out of the US and 3,580 cancellations.
Markwayne Mullin, who leads the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), said there was no indication the outage was a nefarious attack. DHS is the federal department responsible for national security.
The FAA said every flight had been accounted for. It also said international flights would be handled on a case-by-case basis, meaning each one would be decided individually.
