No signs of nefarious attackUS grounds all flights, sparking travel chaos

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A nationwide suspension of flights in the United States sparked widespread disruption and confusion on Friday, leaving passengers stranded at airports as authorities investigated a major telecommunications failure affecting air traffic control.

The US grounded all flights for several hours Friday, sparking travel chaos across the vast country, after what government officials said was a major communications outage caused by decades old technology.

The nationwide stop left hundreds of thousands of passengers in limbo, with some pulled off planes moments before departure by airline staff who appeared in the dark about unfolding events.

The incident marked only the second time such an alert had been issued in US airspace since the 9/11 attacks.

Federal Aviation Authority officials lifted the groundstop after around four hours, with President Donald Trump's administration saying there was no evidence the outage was the result of foul play.

"This is a legacy system problem," said Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy. "We have old, old switches, old routers.

"We use 1980s little copper lines. It's an old system that went down, and went down everywhere. It got overloaded."

Duffy on Thursday had formally asked Congress for $30.1 billion in funds to upgrade and modernize the US Air Traffic Control System.

"I'm going to say it a million times: the Congress has to give the resources to the president so he can finish this bill," he said.

With almost 6,000 flights canceled including some international routes according to FlightAware, the recovery from the stoppage was expected to take some time.

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