Telecommunication issue grounds all U.S. flights one day after global Microsoft outage
The Federal Aviation Administration grounded all U.S. flights on Friday due to a telecommunications issue, only the second nationwide ground stop since the September 11, 2001, attacks.
A ground stop of all flights in the United States was lifted late Friday after more than four hours of cancellations, which the Federal Aviation Administration said it had ordered “due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety.”
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told a press briefing at The White House on Friday evening that the stoppage was triggered as a result of “instability in our radar and our communications in our centers.“
Duffy said while not all telecoms and radar were lost, the decision to halt air travel was taken out of “an abundance of caution and making sure we keep the American public safe,” he said.
Duffy, and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who joined the briefing, insisted that there was no indication of a cyberattack or other national security threat. Instead, Duffy attributed the failure of the system to antiquated air traffic control infrastructure and he called on Congress to approve some $50 billion in federal funding he said was needed for upgrades and modernization.
The nationwide stoppage of flights started at around 4 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Friday. By 6:30 p.m., more than 3,000 flights in the U.S. had been cancelled, according to flight-tracking service FlightAware. Several hundred flights were preemptively canceled for Saturday.
The stoppage came one day after Microsoft experienced a global outage, leaving millions without access to Outlook email, Teams and other widely-used office applications. Mullin told White House reporters earlier in the day that the two incidents were not related.
“I don’t see any reason to connect those two at all,” Mullin said, according to CNN. “Those are separate issues.”
The ground stop occurred just two weeks before the Thanksgiving holiday, one of the busiest travel periods in the U.S. annually. The stoppage also halted all cargo flights from mail and freight shipping companies, such as U.P.S. and FedEx.
The scope of the stoppage is particularly significant because of its rarity in the modern aviation era. The most recent time all flights in the U.S. were grounded was in January 2023, when a pilot notification system became dysfunctional. Before then, the last nationwide ground stop came after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks.
