Duffy points to outdated air traffic control equipment, offering few specifics
The FAA took an extraordinary step Friday afternoon, November 13, 2026, by issuing a nationwide ground stop that prevented any plane from taking off at any airport in the United States, grounding thousands of planes and stranding millions of passengers. The agency cited a telecommunications failure for the halt, and by Friday evening the U.S. air travel system was slowly getting back off the ground. Duffy told reporters at a news conference that the airspace had reopened and the ground stop was lifted, but cautioned that clearing the backlog of canceled and delayed flights would take time, and that determining the cause would take longer still.
During the news conference, Duffy said investigators were still trying to understand exactly what the problem was. He cited intermittent communications and intermittent radar and blamed the failure on outdated air traffic control equipment that was overloaded with data. “We have old switches, old routers,” he said. “It’s an old system that went down. It got overloaded.”
When reporters pushed for clarity on exactly what went wrong, Duffy was not able to give them a whole lot of specifics, and he pivoted again and again to pushing for more money to rebuild the nation’s air traffic control system, which has been a big priority for this administration. NPR’s Joel Rose said the explanation so far rests on the transportation secretary’s account alone: “We still have only Duffy’s word that this was the old gear that failed. We don’t have a lot of detail on what it was.”
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin also attended the news conference. He said “there’s no indication that this was a cyber attack,” but said he could not rule that out entirely. Mullin also started the news conference by saying the outage was not related to the Microsoft outage that knocked out Outlook and some other services the day before.
On the ground, recovery is expected to be slow. Rose said airlines have canceled thousands of flights and delayed thousands more, with planes and crews out of position across the country. “This is a mess, and it’s going to be a mess for days,” Rose said, comparing the disruption to “a giant blizzard at every airport in the country all at once.” He said the whole system is scrambled and that it would take days, optimistically, before the U.S. aviation system returns to normal.
At Washington National Airport, NPR reporter Ava Berger heard announcements that the hold had been lifted, urging passengers to please be patient. Berger said about half the departure board showed canceled flights, and that travelers were starting, optimistically, to go back to their gates to see whether their planes would ever leave.
Nationwide ground stops of this scale are rare. Rose said this was only the second nationwide ground stop since September 11, 2001. The most recent one, in 2023, lasted less than two hours — meaning the Friday halt appears to be the longest nationwide ground stop since September 11, 2001.