Many MindedA telecom failure grounds every US departure for the third time ever
The FAA ordered a nationwide ground stop on Friday, November 13, 2026, halting departures from every US airport. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced it on X, attributing it to a communication issue affecting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers. He said FAA staff were troubleshooting and that he would share updates.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said the stop was not triggered by a security threat. He described the cause as a telecommunications outage at the FAA, said there was no indication of a hostile attack, and said all flights were accounted for. Incoming international flights would be handled case by case. Airlines canceled flights scheduled to depart later in the day, and American Airlines warned of disruptions through the rest of Friday.
The precedents are few. The first nationwide stop came during the September 11, 2001 attacks, when airborne aircraft were ordered down and commercial flights did not resume until September 13. The second was on January 11, 2023, lasting under two hours, after an outage of the Notice to Air Missions system. Now a communications failure, not an attack, has produced the third.
This matters for mobility because a national network with shared choke points can be stopped everywhere by one fault. Cheap, dependable travel needs redundancy in the systems that coordinate flights, not only in aircraft and airports. It also touches security: the officials stressed this was not hostile, but the dependency is the same either way.
Watch for the confirmed cause and how long the stop lasts. Mullin said resolution would take some time, and reporting suggests it may be lengthy, but that is an expectation, not a confirmed duration. The stop followed days after the FAA expanded an AI tool for managing congestion; no causal link has been claimed.
Source: Ars Technica