FAA Grounds All US Flights After System Failure

Passengers at US airports stopped leaving their gates on Friday afternoon when the Federal Aviation Administration ordered all departures to pause. The order froze traffic at every US airport until the agency could fix a communication issue affecting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy posted the news on X, describing the problem as a communication issue impacting every control center. He stated that FAA staff were working to troubleshoot the system and that the agency would release updates as it learned more.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin clarified that the halt was not caused by a security threat. He called it a telecommunications outage and said officials grounded flights out of an abundance of caution. Mullin noted there was no indication of a nefarious attack. The department plans to handle arriving international flights on a case-by-case basis.

This is only the third time the FAA has ordered a nationwide ground stop. The first happened on September 11, 2001, when civilian departures stopped and airborne planes landed. No commercial flights took off again until September 13. The second occurred on January 11, 2023, when a system outage grounded flights for less than two hours.

Airlines have already canceled flights scheduled for later Friday. American Airlines warned that disruptions would likely continue through the rest of the day. The recent expansion of an artificial intelligence tool by the FAA happened just days before this outage.

Mullin told the public there should be no fear and that all flights were accounted for. He acknowledged the situation would take some time to resolve.