Duffy cites communication issue at all control centers

The Federal Aviation Administration grounded every flight scheduled to depart from a United States airport on Friday, in a nationwide stop order that aviation tracker FlightAware said had delayed or canceled nearly 7,000 US flights.

Transportation secretary Sean Duffy announced the stoppage in a post on X, attributing it to “a communication issue impacting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers.” Duffy said FAA technicians were looking into the matter.

The order is the third time all departing flights have been grounded in the United States. The first came on 11 September 2001. The second came in January 2023, when the FAA paused all domestic departures for less than two hours after a pilot notification system malfunctioned.

The scale of the affected system is substantial. The FAA has more than 14,000 air traffic controllers who handle the more than 44,000 flights that take off from airports across the United States each day, according to FAA data.

The Guardian reported the ground stop as developing news and indicated that more details were expected. The duration of Friday’s stoppage, its underlying cause beyond the communication issue Duffy described, and the timeline for restoring departures were not immediately clear.