US aviation agency lifts nationwide ground stop affecting all air travel

Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, said the airspace was now open and the problem had been identified

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has lifted a nationwide ground stop that was declared Friday afternoon, delaying or canceling more than 11,000 US flights, according to aviation tracker FlightAware, and throwing airports into sudden chaos.

The FAA confirmed the airspace was open in an advisory on its website. “So at 8.15 tonight, Eastern Time, we’ve opened up the airspace,” Sean Duffy, the US transportation secretary, said. “But it’s going to take us some time to unwind what’s happened this afternoon.”

Duffy said that the federal government has “identified the problem” that brought down the US air traffic control system on Friday and the system “is operational right now”.

The White House briefing Friday evening with Duffy and Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, quickly turned into a plea for funding from Congress to “fully fund a full build of a brand new air traffic control system”.

“What we have is an incredibly old air traffic control system,” Duffy said. “Our routers actually got overloaded with data, and … they started to give us inconsistency in the data from those routers. And because of that, we shut the system down,” he added.

Earlier Friday, Duffy said in a social media post that the stoppage was due to “a communication issue impacting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers” and that the FAA’s technicians are looking into the matter.

A notice from the FAA said the ground stop was being imposed “due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety”.

Duffy said that more than 3,500 airplanes were in the air when the ground stop was issued.

Mullin said in a news conference that preliminary investigations into the stoppage did not indicate that it was tied to a “nefarious attack”.

“There’s no indication as of yet that this was a nefarious attack against it. It’s just a telecommunications outage as of right now,” he told reporters.

As news of the airspace reopening trickled down to airline passengers, not all greeted the news with joy. A woman at John F Kennedy airport in New York who gave her name as simply Lola said she was frustrated. She had already rebooked her flight to Atlanta for another day and was going home. “I don’t like it,” she said.

Amid the earlier confusion at US airports, the California governor, Gavin Newsom, called the Trump administration to offer more clarity to passengers who are trying to get to their destinations.

“Americans are stuck at airports across the country. They deserve answers, clear updates, and a plan to get home safely. Instead, the Trump Administration is correcting reporters on AI’s “preferred name”. These are not serious people,” Newsom wrote in a post on X, in reference to Mullin correcting a reporter’s use of the term AI earlier in the day.

In an interview on CNN, US congressman Ro Khanna said that he is waiting to be briefed on what exactly led to the technical issues and sparked the ground stoppage and for more public-facing communications from the transportation secretary.

“There’s a lot of nervousness,” Khanna said of the feeling among passengers. “We’re waiting to be briefed in Congress about what, exactly, has happened. We just need communication from them. If they were there every hour briefing the American public, it would help and give us a sense of a timeline.”

According to CNN, the FAA told airlines that the outages are the result of router malfunctions that are believed to have originated at Chicago Midway international airport and rippled across the rest of the US.

Amid the uncertainty, San Francisco international airport announced in a social media post that flights bound for Hawaii and Asia were cleared to depart.

John F Kennedy airport posted on its social media that travelers should confirm flight status with the airline before heading to the airport.

British Airways cancelled a flight to New York that had been due to take off from Heathrow at 10.30pm on Friday night, and a spokesperson for Manchester airport confirmed three US-bound flights scheduled to leave on Saturday morning – all operated by Virgin Atlantic – were likely to be affected if the issue was not resolved soon.

A ground-stop order by the FAA requires that aircraft remain on the ground and bars them from taking off. Planes already in the air are usually allowed to remain in the air.

This is the third time all departing flights have been grounded in the US. The first time was on 9/11; the other was in January 2023, when the FAA paused all ⁠domestic departures for less than two hours after a pilot notification system malfunctioned.

The FAA has more than 14,000 air traffic controllers who handle the more than 44,000 flights that take off from airports across the US each day, according to FAA data.

Last week, the FAA announced that the first digital air traffic control towers in the US were officially operational in Alaska and Florida, as part of a modernization project intended to reduce flight delays and improve the flow of air traffic.

Last year, ​Congress ​approved $12.5bn to fix ​the FAA’s ageing communications system, and ​on Friday ‌the FAA ​and ​White House asked Congress for another $30.1bn to address other issues.