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US flights resume after FAA lifts nationwide ground stop that lasted more than four hours

ByThe Watchers Staff
An Alaska Airlines Airbus A321neo in a blue-to-red More to Love livery rolling down a runway at JFK Airport, with grass and trees in the background

The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) lifted its nationwide ground stop on the evening of Friday, November 13, 2026, and said airplane departures can resume, the Associated Press reported. The stop lasted more than four hours, ABC News reported.

The FAA had halted all departing flights across the US on the afternoon of Friday, November 13, 2026, after what it called “a temporary telecommunications outage” affecting the air traffic control centers that direct planes en route between airports.

Cause

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said at a White House briefing that at 3:36 p.m. ET “we experienced instability for our radar and our communications in our centers and our TRACONs across the country.” He said the system’s switches and routers “got overloaded with data” and began to give inconsistent data, and that the system was shut down because of it, ABC News reported.

Duffy described an “incredibly old air traffic control system” that uses analog telecom. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said there was “no cyberattack” and that “it appears that this was mechanically driven,” but added that officials were still looking and would not rule it out.

Delays and cancellations

Flight tracking service FlightAware showed nearly 5,000 flights cancelled on Friday and nearly 800 cancellations already listed for Saturday, ABC7 reported.

Delta issued a waiver allowing passengers to change their flights at no extra cost for Friday and Saturday. United said passengers could reschedule and that it would waive change fees and fare differences for new United flights departing between November 12 and November 20, 2026.

Travellers are advised to check flight status directly with their airline.

Context

It was only the second nationwide halt of all departures since the September 11, 2001, attacks. The previous one, in January 2023, followed a failure of the FAA’s NOTAM system and lasted less than two hours. Here is how the three events compare.

Sources: AP, ABC News, ABC7 San Francisco, FAA on X (outage post)

Featured image: An Alaska Airlines Airbus A321neo on its takeoff roll at New York’s JFK Airport in July 2019. File photo: Adam Moreira (AEMoreira042281) / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

The Watchers Staff covers earthquakes, volcanoes, severe weather, space weather and other natural events. Published since 2011, The Watchers reports on a changing planet and the science behind it.

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