Airlines are working to rebuild schedules after the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) halted every departure from US airports for more than four hours on Friday, a stoppage that also held up flights to the US from Europe.
The FAA issued the nationwide ground stop at 3:54pm Eastern Time (20:54 GMT) on 13 November, citing “extraordinary circumstances” after a telecommunications outage hit its air route traffic control centres. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said airspace reopened at 8:15pm ET (01:15 GMT on Saturday).
More than 4,700 flights were cancelled and about 10,000 delayed on Friday, according to Flightradar24, with around 700 cancellations already logged for Saturday. Data firm Cirium said about 11,000 flights carrying more than 1.5mn passengers were still due to depart after 4pm ET, and at least 827 had been diverted by 7:05pm ET, 670 of them back to their departure airports.
The disruption spread across the Atlantic. At the FAA’s request, Eurocontrol suspended US-bound departures from its 42 member states, including the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, Reuters reported. Inbound international flights were managed case by case, and about 3,100 aircraft already in the air and heading for US airports were allowed to land, according to Flightradar24.
Duffy said switches and routers had become overloaded with data and gone down, causing intermittent gaps in communications and radar rather than a total loss of either. Officials said new technology added to the system had overloaded older parts of the network. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said there was no indication of a cyberattack and that the public had never been in danger.
Air Space Intelligence, which makes the SMART AI traffic management tool the FAA began rolling out to its en route centres this week, denied any link to the outage. Verizon, which holds an FAA telecoms contract, said its network was “fully functioning”.
It was only the second nationwide stop of all departures since the 11 September 2001 attacks. The previous one, in January 2023, followed a failure of the FAA’s Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system and lasted less than two hours.
Duffy said flights would resume gradually, depending on the availability of pilots and cabin crew, and that he expected operations to be back to normal by Thanksgiving on 26 November. He called for $50bn to replace what he described as old switches, routers and “1980s little copper lines”. A Government Accountability Office report in September had warned about the system’s ageing copper cabling. Congress approved $12.5bn for an air traffic control overhaul last year, and on Friday the FAA and White House asked lawmakers for a further $30.1bn.
The US outage comes as carriers are still cutting flights in the Middle East. Etihad Airways has cancelled all flights between Abu Dhabi and Riyadh and Dammam until 19 November, as Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport only partially reopens after an attack in October, while British Airways has suspended London–Riyadh until 11 January 2027. SWISS has already pushed back the restart of its Dubai flights to March, and Wizz Air blamed Middle East disruption and fuel costs for a 66% fall in first-half profit.
