FAA lifts its longest nationwide ground stop since 9/11

Outage traced to overloaded legacy air traffic control switches

The FAA’s initial announcement at 15:54 EST (20:54 GMT) said all flights departing within the US would be grounded until further notice. More than 3,500 airplanes were in the air at the time. Some were diverted to other airports and others flew on to their destinations. Hours later, some flights were allowed to take off from San Francisco International airport, and the FAA reopened US skies at 20:15 EST. The ground stop led to more than 8,500 delayed and nearly 8,000 cancelled flights on Friday, according to FlightAware.

The stoppage rippled well beyond American airspace. All US-bound air traffic from Eurocontrol member states was suspended “on request of the FAA due to technical issues”, according to Eurocontrol’s website. There are 42 Eurocontrol member states, including dozens of EU nations, the UK, Ukraine, and Turkey, as well as Israel and Morocco. Australia’s largest international airport, Sydney, grounded all US-bound flights until further notice, and Air Canada cancelled flights between the US and Canada.

The disruption left tens of thousands of people stranded in airports around the country, many of them “without any knowledge of where they’re going to sleep tonight”, Duffy said at a news conference on Friday night. An EPA image in the BBC report was captioned “Luggage from cancelled flights at Ronald Reagan airport”.

Duffy said the stoppage was caused by an “incredibly old air traffic control system” and that a legacy air traffic control communications system became overloaded. “So this is analogue telecom. Our switches, our routers actually got overloaded with data and they went down,” Duffy said. He said the failure affected communications and radar. The system needs a complete overhaul, he said, estimating a $50 billion price tag. “It’s going to continue to fail,” he said. Duffy said the outage would cause a ripple effect for a few days. “It’s going to take us some time to unwind what’s happened this afternoon,” he said.

Mullin told the same news conference that officials had seen “zero evidence” it was a cyber-attack. He also ruled out any link to the global Microsoft outage that began on Thursday. Mullin said the introduction of some new technology into an old air traffic control system had overwhelmed it. Both cabinet secretaries insisted the public was never in danger during the stoppage.

Airlines reported restarting service at different paces. Delta Air Lines and United Airlines said they were resuming operations. American Airlines said it was “focused on operating as many remaining flights as possible this evening”. JetBlue said it would resume flights on Saturday morning.

The stoppage was only the second such nationwide grounding since the immediate aftermath of the al-Qaeda plane hijackings of 11 September 2001. Dr Guy Gratton, an associate professor of aviation at Cranfield University, told BBC Verify: “This looks like the worst since 9/11, but clearly not on that scale.”

Dr Gratton pointed to a US grounding in 2023 due to a failure in the Notice to Air Missions (Notam) system. “That lasted 1 hour and 52 minutes, delayed about 9,500 flights and cancelled about 1,300,” he said. The 2023 outage meant air traffic safety notices could no longer be published, and flights were grounded until that system was restored. Friday’s incident lasted longer than the 2023 event.