US to resume flights after air traffic network failure sparks chaos

Detailed summary

(2nd UPDATE) Though the ground stop was lifted, the disruption for passengers is far from over

CANCELED FLIGHTS. A person looks at a departures board showing cancelled flights at Chicago O'Hare International Airport, after the US Federal Aviation Administration issued a national ground stop "due to extraordinary circumstances and reasons for safety" following the agency's earlier report of serious air traffic control communications issues, in Chicago, Illinois, US, November 13, 2026.

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WASHINGTON, USA – The US Federal Aviation Administration lifted a nationwide ground stop on Friday, November 13, after a communications failure at air traffic control centers caused chaos at airports and triggered the longest nationwide shutdown since the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said US airspace reopened at 8:15 pm Eastern Time (0115 GMT’ 9:15 am Philippine time), but warned that departures would resume gradually and it would take time for airlines to restore normal operations.

More than 6,600 flights were canceled and 8,600 delayed, with another 1,500 already canceled for Sunday, according to FlightRadar24. Aviation analysts said the four-hour nationwide grounding could disrupt airline schedules for days.

Duffy said tens of thousands of passengers were stranded at airports around the country. Duffy said he and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin had met with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office to discuss the outage.

The failure is the latest and most dramatic sign of strain on a US air traffic control system beset by aging technology, equipment and communications problems and a shortage of several thousand controllers.

Duffy said the trouble began at 3:36 p.m., when air traffic control centers experienced instability in radar and communications systems.

“Our switches, our routers actually got overloaded with data and they started to give us inconsistencies in the data from those routers and because of that we shut the system down,” Duffy said, adding that…

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