US grounds all flights for several hours due to system outage

A nationwide groundstop halted all flights across the United States for approximately four hours on Friday after an outage in the air traffic control system, according to a report by Mehr News. The Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) lifted the groundstop after about four hours. The incident marked only the second time such a nationwide alert had been issued in US airspace since the 9/11 attacks.

Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy attributed the outage to an aging system. "This is a legacy system problem," he said. "We have old, old switches, old routers. We use 1980s little copper lines. It's an old system that went down, and went down everywhere. It got overloaded." Duffy had formally asked Congress on Thursday for $30.1 billion to upgrade and modernize the US air traffic control system. As the groundstop was lifted, he repeated his request, saying, "I'm going to say it a million times: the Congress has to give the resources to the president so he can finish this bill."

According to FlightAware, almost 6,000 flights were canceled, including some international routes. The recovery from the stoppage was expected to take some time. Footage from airports around the country showed gates full, with planes waiting on taxiways. Passengers thronged concourses, seeking information about the outage that disrupted their travel plans. "We're trying to debate whether or not we need to reschedule or drive or what, but if the whole country is stopped, that means the highways are going to be jammed too," said Joseph Anderson, 72, who was trying to fly from Las Vegas to Oakland, California.

US airspace is among the busiest in the world and was ramping up to its most frenetic period as the Thanksgiving holiday approached. A nationwide groundstop is highly unusual; there was one such stop in January 2023 when a pilot notification system failed, but the only other national stop happened in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, when no aircraft took to the skies for days.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin stressed that there was no evidence of any hostile action on Friday. "We've seen zero evidence that this was a cyber attack or (AI) attack," he told a press conference. He also ruled out any connection with the outage that affected Microsoft this week, which knocked email systems offline for millions of users, public services, and businesses worldwide. The report by Mehr News added that the unprecedented nationwide halt left hundreds of thousands of passengers stranded, with travelers being pulled off aircraft just before takeoff by airline staff who were equally unaware of the unfolding crisis.