USAupdated 19m ago2 min read
FAA Resumes Takeoffs After Communications Failure Grounds U.S. Flights for Over Four Hours
“there is still no indication that the disruption was caused by a cyberattack, but he does not rule it out.”
“no evidence of a cyberattack while investigating the exact cause of the failure.”
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Ground stop lifted after four-hour nationwide outage caused by air traffic control communications failure. Takeoffs resumed nationwide at 8:15pm ET after the outage, per FAA.
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Ground Stop Lifted
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration resumed authorizing takeoffs at airports across the country after more than four hours of suspension following a communications failure in air traffic control centers.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the airspace reopened at 8:15 p.m. Friday, Eastern Time, and warned that delays could extend for several days.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said the FAA was incorporating new equipment and technology into the old infrastructure, and he explained that partial updates could have overloaded the system.
The FAA had ordered the suspension of aircraft takeoffs at all airports in the country for "extraordinary circumstances and safety reasons" after detecting inconsistent data from routers in the air traffic control system.
The suspension had halted departures at major airports including Atlanta, Miami, Los Angeles, and New York JFK, leaving tens of thousands of passengers on the ground.
Cause, Cyberattack, Numbers
Sean Duffy said the system will take time to return to full operation and reach full capacity again before the peak travel period expected for Thanksgiving (November 26).
Duffy attributed the failure to the old telecom network routers becoming overloaded and starting to transmit inconsistent data, which affected radar and communications.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said he has seen "no evidence" that this was a cyberattack, and he also told White House reporters that there were no indications of an attack on the country.
FlightAware figures showed the scale of disruption, with Business Standard reporting that as of 9.15 p.m. New York time almost 6,500 flights had been canceled and some 8,800 delays were delayed in, out and within the US.
Business Standard also quoted Duffy saying, "Our switches, our routers, actually got overloaded with data, and they went down," as investigators continued to look into what triggered the failure.
Aftermath and Next Steps
The FAA directive left airlines facing the challenge of restoring schedules after the shutdown, with delays and cancellations potentially rippling through the system as carriers worked to get aircraft and crews back into position. Duffy told reporters that investigators were still looking into what triggered the failure and ruled out that it was due to SMART, an AI-based tool used to analyze weather and flight paths data. Markwayne Mullin said the FAA was putting "patches into the system" and that the "new technology" was "overwhelming the older system," while also asserting that there was nothing indicating a cyberattack.
The Trump administration asked Congress for $50 billion to modernize the air traffic control system, and Business Standard reported that the transportation secretary said the request was for $50 billion in emergency funding. As the system recovered, the disruption also reached beyond the United States, with Eurocontrol reporting on its website that all air traffic bound for the United States from its member states had been suspended "at the request of the FAA due to technical problems."