The FAA ground stop that halted departures from every US airport ended at 8:15 p.m. Eastern on Friday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said. It had run for more than four hours. The agency blamed a telecommunications failure at its air route traffic control centers. Officials said they saw no sign of an attack.
By 7:30 p.m. Eastern, FlightAware counted 10,079 delays and 4,238 cancellations on flights into, out of or within the US, NBC News reported. The same tracker logged 99 cancellations on the Wednesday before.
About 11,000 flights were due to leave US airports after 4 p.m., carrying more than 1.5 million passengers. The data firm Cirium gave those numbers to the Associated Press. Most never moved.
Four hours that emptied the departure boards
All times are Eastern, on Friday, Nov. 13.
- 3:36 p.m. Duffy later put the start here. A controller told Scripps News they heard of a radio frequency problem around then.
- 4:16 p.m. Duffy posted on X about “a communication issue impacting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers”. The FAA advisory cited “extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety”, Newsweek reported.
- 5:00 p.m. Europe’s aviation regulator suspended US-bound departures until midnight at the FAA’s request. Mexico’s regulator held its US-bound flights. San Francisco began releasing Pacific departures, per the AP.
- 5:50 p.m. Cirium counted at least 600 diversions. In 104 cases the plane landed somewhere the crew had not planned on.
- 6:20 p.m. FlightAware showed more than 2,000 cancellations and more than 10,000 delays, ABC News reported.
- 8:15 p.m. The airspace reopened. The FAA said it had “thoroughly tested our systems to confirm they were stable” first.
Duffy said about 3,500 planes were in the air when the order went out. Every one of them landed.
JetBlue cut Saturday before Friday had ended
Airlines cut fast. JetBlue told staff it would drop the rest of Friday’s flights apart from European routes, plus Saturday’s, CNBC reported. The aim was to get crews and aircraft back into place. Air Canada dropped its remaining US flights for the evening.
Sport felt it within minutes. The Brooklyn Nets had boarded in New Orleans when their flight to Memphis stopped. The San Jose Sharks still sat waiting for Utah.
No. 2 Utah, No. 8 Texas and No. 9 Tennessee all stalled at the start of college football road trips. Duffy told teams to call the FAA for a slot.
Duffy blames overloaded routers. The root cause is still open
The FAA posted that there had been “a temporary telecommunications outage”. It halted flights “out of an abundance of caution”. A spokesperson told FedScoop the problem hit multiple air route traffic control centers, and that technicians were investigating.
Duffy went further. “Our switches, our routers, actually got overloaded with data,” he said. He called the network “1980s little copper lines” and put the repair bill at $50 billion. “This is an emergency,” he said.
At a White House briefing, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said there was “no indication, as of yet, that this was a nefarious act against us”. CBS News reported the remarks. Mullin ruled out a cyberattack on the evidence so far. He also ruled out any link to the Microsoft 365 outage that hit Outlook and Teams the day before.
Nobody has produced a root cause. Sources told CBS News that an update to the private network behind air traffic control triggered a reboot, then a crash, then the outage. L3Harris runs that network, CBS said, and the company did not immediately comment.
Mullin said separately that officials were examining whether new FAA equipment overwhelmed the older gear around it. The FAA has confirmed none of this. It has set no date to.
A cancellation gets your money back. A short delay does not
Federal rules here are narrow, and airline apps tend to offer a voucher first.
The refund rule took effect in 2024 and sits in 14 CFR Part 260. If your flight is canceled or significantly changed, and you turn down what the airline offers instead, you can claim a full refund of fare, taxes and extras. That refund is automatic. It goes back to the card you paid with, and the airline cannot charge a fee to process it.
“Significant” carries a number. On a domestic itinerary it means leaving three or more hours earlier, or landing three or more hours later. International flights get a six-hour threshold. A different airport at either end, an extra connection or a downgrade also qualify.
Below those lines you have no federal refund right, and none at all once you accept the rebooking and fly. Meals and hotels sit outside the rule too. They rest on each airline’s own commitments, which the Transportation Department tracks on its flightrights.gov dashboard. DOT ties most of those commitments to disruptions the airline itself caused. A failure inside the FAA’s network is not one.
So take the cash rather than the voucher if you no longer want the trip. And hold your booking somewhere you can reach. United has just barred AI agents from booking its flights, which matters when a third-party tool is holding your seat.
Four FAA outages in under four years
Friday was only the second nationwide ground stop since Sept. 11, 2001. It was not a one-off. The same telecommunications layer has given way three other times since 2023.
- Jan. 11, 2023. The Notice to Air Missions system failed and the FAA stopped departures nationwide. Airlines canceled more than 1,300 flights and delayed more than 11,000. Contract staff had deleted files by accident while fixing a database, the agency said later, per NPR.
- Sept. 19, 2025. A telecom failure hit Dallas TRACON, and American Airlines alone canceled more than 530 flights. The FAA blamed Frontier’s data service. It also said “an oversight by L3 Harris, an FAA contractor, failed to make sure that redundancies in the system functioned properly”, CBS Texas reported.
- Sept. 21, 2026. Philadelphia TRACON lost its primary circuit, switched to the backup and found that fiber cut at a New Jersey construction site. Ground stops spread to Newark, Philadelphia, Teterboro, JFK and LaGuardia, AeroCorner reported. We covered that New York airport outage at the time.
- Nov. 13, 2026. Friday.
Half the FAA’s copper is still in the ground
Auditors saw this coming. In September 2024 the Government Accountability Office rated 51 of the FAA’s 138 air traffic control systems unsustainable. It rated another 54 potentially unsustainable. The report’s title: “FAA Actions Are Urgently Needed to Modernize Aging Systems”.
A follow-up dated Sept. 14 this year found the FAA had swapped 2,560 of 5,170 copper lines for fiber by May 2026. That is barely half. GAO traces the cables to the 1960s. Congress put up $12.5 billion in July 2025, $9 billion of it for systems. The FAA had obligated $1.8 billion of that by March 2026, about a fifth. GAO also counted 11,389 separate project schedules that nobody has integrated.
New wire is not a new design. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford made that point after the September outage: “We’re pulling copper up and putting fiber down, but it’s the same data architecture that we’ve had for 50 years.”
What to watch this weekend
Duffy said recovery would be slow, and that the FAA would spend Saturday morning repositioning aircraft with the airlines. He expects normal service by Thanksgiving. JetBlue has already cut its Saturday schedule.
Senator Maria Cantwell, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Commerce Committee, said the committee will review the communications technology involved. Senator Tammy Duckworth said she would press the FAA too. Neither has set a hearing date. The FAA has given no date for the root cause report, the document that will settle whether Friday was a worn-out router or a botched upgrade.