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FAA grounds all US departures in nationwide telecom outage

More than 11,000 flights delayed or canceled, third total flight halt in US history comes the same day the agency asks Congress for another 30 billion dollars

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Travelers at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Virginia on 13 November 2026. Photograph: Tom Johnson/The Guardian Travelers at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Virginia on 13 November 2026. Photograph: Tom Johnson/The Guardian theguardian.com
US flight outage live updates: FAA grounds thousands of flights as Trump administration looks for cause of nationwide delays US flight outage live updates: FAA grounds thousands of flights as Trump administration looks for cause of nationwide delays theguardian.com

The Federal Aviation Administration halted every departing flight in the United States on Friday afternoon after a telecommunications outage struck all Air Route Traffic Control Centers, leaving more than 11,000 flights delayed or canceled according to aviation tracker FlightAware. The ground stop, which began around 4pm Eastern time, is only the second nationwide grounding of departures since the September 2001 attacks.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on X that a communication issue was affecting all of the country's en-route control centers and that FAA technicians were investigating. The agency described "extraordinary circumstances" in its notice imposing the stop and said every airborne flight had been accounted for, with international arrivals to be handled case by case. Markwayne Mullin, the former Oklahoma senator now leading the Department of Homeland Security, told reporters there was no indication of a "nefarious attack" — "it's just a telecommunications outage as of right now" — while conceding that nothing had been ruled out and the cause remained unknown.

At Reagan National Airport outside Washington, gate agents and passengers refreshed their phones for updates and tried to rebook, with nearly every seat filled and travelers working from laptops balanced on luggage. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said she was in close contact with leadership at the city's airport authority, which runs LAX, the fifth-busiest airport in the country. The FAA's more than 14,000 controllers normally handle some 44,000 daily departures.

The grounding lands on an agency already asking for money. Last year Congress approved $12.5 billion to repair the FAA's ageing communications system; on Friday, the same day the network failed, the FAA and the White House asked lawmakers for another $30.1 billion. The previous nationwide stop, in January 2023, was lifted in under two hours after a pilot notification system malfunctioned; this one came with no clear estimate of how long it would last. Just last week the FAA celebrated its first operational digital control towers in Alaska and Florida as proof that its modernization program was on track.