Flights are moving again across the United States after the Federal Aviation Administration lifted a nationwide ground stop that halted departures for more than four hours Friday, but travelers face another day of cancellations and delays as airlines work to get planes and crews back where they belong.
The FAA stopped all departures at 3:54 p.m. ET Friday, citing extraordinary circumstances and safety, after its radar and communications systems became unstable at regional air traffic control centers, ABC News reported. The order was lifted at 8:15 p.m. ET. It was the first nationwide ground stop since January 2023, when a failure of the FAA’s pilot notice system grounded flights, according to the AP and ABC News.
How many flights were affected
- About 3,500 planes were in the air when the stop began, according to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, ABC News reported. Flights already airborne were allowed to land.
- By 4 p.m., about 11,000 flights carrying more than 1.5 million passengers were still scheduled to depart Friday, according to aviation data firm Cirium, Al Jazeera reported.
- At least 827 flights diverted, most of them back to the airports they had left.
- FlightRadar24 reported more than 4,700 cancellations and 10,000 delays Friday, plus about 700 cancellations already on the books for Saturday.
What went wrong
Officials said switches and routers that carry air traffic data became overloaded and produced inconsistent data, so the system was shut down. Duffy said there was no total loss of communications or radar. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said new technology added to an old system had overwhelmed it, according to the AP.
Duffy blamed aging equipment. “We have old switches, old routers. We use 1980s little copper lines,” he said, according to Al Jazeera. A Government Accountability Office report in September had warned that aging copper cables and poorly scheduled system changes could overwhelm the network, Al Jazeera reported.
Was it a cyberattack? Mullin said there was no indication of one so far, but that investigators were not ruling anything out, ABC News reported. The contractor behind a new AI system called SMART said the outage was not caused by its product, and Duffy said SMART could not have caused it.
The political response
Duffy called the situation an emergency and urged Congress to fund a complete overhaul of the air traffic control system, warning, “You will have more of these” without it, ABC News reported. He has called for $50 billion in upgrades, according to Al Jazeera. Democrats pressed for an explanation: House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries called it an unprecedented breakdown and demanded answers, and Sen. Maria Cantwell said the Senate Commerce Committee would review the communications problems, ABC News reported.
A rough day for systems
The ground stop capped a week of tech troubles. Microsoft said Saturday that its services were fully restored after an hours-long global outage that disrupted Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 apps in dozens of countries, the AP reported. Microsoft said that problem was not related to a cyberattack. We covered the outage in our Friday report. In New Orleans, a congressman said the ground stop delayed federal investigators headed to the site of a tanker collision with a river cruise boat, though officials said the two events were unrelated.
What travelers should do
Duffy said recovery would be slow and that he expects the system to be fully operational before Thanksgiving travel, which begins in under two weeks. An aviation safety expert told Al Jazeera that rescheduling planes and crews can take more than a day, with connections at major hubs most at risk.
- Check your flight status with your airline before leaving home.
- Use your airline’s app to rebook; it is often faster than waiting in line.
- If you have a Thanksgiving trip booked, see our guide to the busiest travel days and building a backup plan.
Upstormed News will follow the FAA investigation and Congress’s response.
Read more: Police Find Sixth Victim in D.C. Logan Circle Shooting
Were you stuck at an airport Friday? Tell us how your trip went in the comments.
Sources: ABC News, “Nationwide ground stop lifted after more than 4 hours as Trump administration blames old, overloaded tech” (November 13, 2026); Al Jazeera, “FAA ground stop lifted: Why were US flights grounded, and what’s next?” (November 14, 2026); AP via Clinton Herald, “AP News Summary at 4:38 a.m. EST” (November 14, 2026); AP via Yahoo News, “Microsoft says services fully restored after hourslong global outage” (November 14, 2026); Fox News, “FAA lifts nationwide ground stop of planes at US airports, major delays to continue” (November 13, 2026)
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