FAA Grounds All U.S. Departures After Communications Outage

On Friday, November 13, 2026, the FAA stopped all new takeoffs from U.S. airports, while aircraft already airborne could still land. The agency blamed a temporary telecommunications outage, yet the deeper cause is not confirmed. That gap between the order and its explanation shapes everything that follows.

The FAA's alert gave two reasons for stopping every departure in the country: "extraordinary circumstances" and safety. Nationwide stops are rare; a count of true all-departure stops puts this one as only the third, after September 11, 2001 and January 11, 2023.

The advisory from the FAA Command Center took effect at 3:54 p.m. ET. It listed an end time of 10 p.m. Central, yet it also said departures stay stopped until further notice, and an advisory at 5:46 p.m. ET said flights would be allowed as facilities recover. Beyond ordering departing traffic to remain stopped, the alert said nothing else.

Not everything stayed on the ground. A handful of departures still went: some flights over the ocean, in Alaska and in Hawaii, Pacific-bound flights out of San Francisco, and, Boston Logan reported, some transatlantic flights. Inbound international flights were handled case by case.

The FAA blamed a temporary telecommunications outage, ordered out of an abundance of caution. The deeper cause is not confirmed, and the rest of this piece separates what officials have stated from what has only been reported.

How a ground stop works, and why losing communications grounds everything

A ground stop is the bluntest tool in air traffic management. A ground stop keeps every qualifying flight at its departure airport until the order is lifted. A ground delay program instead assigns departure times, so arrivals spread out over a longer period. The FAA uses delay programs when demand at an airport is projected to exceed what it can accept, most often because of low cloud or poor visibility.

The same tool can be local, regional or national. The scope of a stop can be set by distance, by en route center or by tier, so nearby departures may be held while distant ones are not. Local facilities can also impose stops of up to 15 minutes without notifying the Command Center, a figure repeated in an aviation news site's account of a traffic management guide. Earlier on Friday the FAA had already stopped flights at Chicago's O'Hare and Midway for an equipment outage, a separate local action that the nationwide order then overtook.

The reason a communications failure reaches every airport lies in the en route system. The 22 Air Route Traffic Control Centers each handle communication for flights above 18,000 feet, and they sit in major hubs such as New York, Los Angeles and Atlanta. If controllers cannot talk to pilots across those centers, they cannot safely manage traffic in that airspace, and the flights that would enter it stay on the ground.

The exceptions show the order was narrower than it first sounded. Flights within Hawaii and from the West Coast to Hawaii could continue, Alaska and Hawaiian Airlines said. East Coast international departures could go over the Atlantic, and southbound flights from Jacksonville, Houston, Miami and San Juan could head over the Gulf. A forum comment's claim that Europe and Mexico flights were stopped while Pacific flights went conflicts with the transatlantic departures Boston reported.

Aircraft already airborne kept landing, airspace was not ordered cleared, and DHS said there was no indication of an attack.

How big the disruption has been so far

No final totals exist yet, so the scale is best read as a series of snapshots. By about 6:40 p.m. ET, FlightAware showed about 3,000 U.S. flights canceled, with many more delayed.

• 1,913: FlightAware cancellations at 6:04 p.m. ET, alongside 10,494 delays
• 2,000+: cancellations at 6:20 p.m., with more than 10,000 delayed
• 4,238: cancellations at 7:30 p.m. ET, with 10,079 delays
• 11,000: flights scheduled to depart after 4 p.m. ET, per Cirium
• 600: flights diverted Friday, per Cirium, with 104 sent to other airports

The cancellation numbers look inconsistent but are the same measure taken at different times. The delay count does not climb steadily because it mixes in earlier weather delays, and counts shift as delayed flights become cancellations. Early figures of 6,575 delays and 331 cancellations at about 4:30 p.m. included pre-existing weather delays, so they understate the stop's own effect.

Airborne counts differ for a reason the sources do not explain. Flightradar24 data put about 3,100 aircraft bound for U.S. airports in the air when the stop began. A separate NBC report, also citing Flightradar24, counted 4,042 flights headed for U.S. destinations at the time of the alert. Either way, those flights were allowed to land.

Dartmouth's Vikrant Vaze estimated 3,000 to 4,000 flights were held up in the first two-plus hours, out of about 25,000 daily U.S. domestic flights. An unnamed aviation expert put stranded passengers at 300,000 to 400,000, an estimate NBC's own card rates as low confidence.

At airports the strain showed in different ways. By 6 p.m. Reagan Washington National was at capacity and O'Hare was nearing it, leaving planes nowhere to park, a source told NBC. By 5 p.m. CT O'Hare had 208 cancellations with 85-minute average delays, and Tulsa International said at least one aircraft turned around and four others did not take off.

What the FAA says caused it, and what is only reported

The official account is short: communications issues were hitting multiple Air Route Traffic Control Centers at about 4 p.m. The FAA called the information preliminary, and technicians are still investigating.

Cabinet officials added scope but not cause. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy described a communication issue affecting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers. Other accounts are narrower: he was also quoted as describing regional centers nationwide, and radio frequency outages were reported at centers including Boston, Chicago and New York. The exact footprint of the outage is therefore unclear.

Several outlets, citing unnamed people, point at a private network. CBS reported that an update to the private communications network connecting air traffic control caused a reboot, a crash and an outage, and that L3Harris runs that network; the company had not responded. People briefed on the matter told a newspaper that the outage appears to affect an L3Harris-overseen network that carries the radio frequencies controllers use to talk to pilots.

A third account is narrower still. An airline source said the FAA told airlines it was a network router problem, which unnamed sources believe began at Chicago Midway and cascaded nationwide. None of these accounts has been confirmed by the FAA, which said it was not immediately clear what caused the outage.

Some theories have been ruled out by those closest to them. The FAA said it rolled out a new AI advisory tool for controllers this week and there is no evidence the stop was related. Nor was the stop a result of the SMART system, whose contractor rejected the link. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, ranking member of the Aviation Subcommittee, wants a thorough investigation of the cause and will demand answers. Canadian systems saw no impact.

Calling the stop a formal safety-incident finding would overstate what exists. The FAA's stated reasons are generic, and the specific cause remains under investigation. That suggests calling the stop a formal safety-incident finding would go further than the evidence.

What is known and not known

• Confirmed: the FAA ordered all departures stopped on November 13, 2026, with airborne flights allowed to land.
• Confirmed: the FAA cites a temporary telecommunications outage affecting multiple en route centers.
• Not confirmed: the L3Harris network update and the router-problem accounts, which rest on unnamed sources.
• Not known: a root cause, since the FAA has not given details on the nature of the disruption or how long repairs could take.
• Not known: final cancellation, delay and passenger totals, or airport-by-airport figures.
• Not known: airline or airport cost statements, and any cargo-industry cost estimate.

The cyberattack question is the most sensitive gap, and officials have answered it carefully. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said there was no indication yet of a nefarious attack, but that a cyberattack had not been ruled out. Officials cautioned that their no-cyberattack assessment could change, and a NORAD spokeswoman said there was no evidence yet of nefarious action by domestic or foreign actors.

One link has been checked and found empty so far. Three senior officials told NBC nothing indicates a connection between the FAA incident and the Microsoft outage the day before. The investigation was at a very early stage, and Mullin said President Donald Trump had been briefed and nothing was being ruled out.

End times are the other loose thread. Listings of the end time disagreed with one another, and the advisory itself said departures stay stopped until further notice. Mullin said there was no timeline for restarting flights, and no official announcement that the stop had ended turned up at the time of writing.

How solid the numbers are: the flight counts come from FlightAware and Cirium snapshots taken through a single evening, and the passenger estimates come from individual experts, one of them unnamed. Treat all of them as a floor that will be revised.

How this compares with earlier nationwide stops

The two earlier ones differ from it, and from each other, in important ways.

• On September 11, 2001, the FAA ordered the first national ground stop in U.S. history, and a National Archives account from 2021 says more than 4,500 aircraft were in the air when the airspace was then shut down.
• September 13, 2001: Airspace reopened for limited commercial service, while Reagan National did not resume flights until October 4, 2001.
• January 11, 2023: A NOTAM system failure halted domestic departures for about 90 minutes, with more than 10,000 delays and over 1,300 cancellations.
• September 2026: A cable cut triggered a local stop at Newark.
• October 13, 2026: Flights bound for Houston Bush Intercontinental were held from about 18:30 to 20:00 local time after a damaged fiber-optic cable.
• November 13, 2026: The FAA halted all U.S. departures at 3:54 p.m. ET after communications failed across en route centers.

Friday's stop is closer to 2023 than to 9/11. Planes already airborne kept flying and airspace was not ordered cleared, whereas in 2001 every aircraft was told to land. Accounts of the 2023 failure vary in wording, with some calling it a NOTAM outage and others a pilot alert system failure, but they describe the same system. What separates the three events is how far each order reached.

What it means for travelers, airlines and shippers

Airlines moved first on rebooking. Delta let passengers change flights at no extra cost for Friday and Saturday. United waived change fees and fare differences, provided the new United flight departs between November 12 and November 20, 2026, in the same cabin and between the same cities. JetBlue told staff it would cancel the rest of Friday's flights except European routes, plus Saturday flights, so crews and aircraft are in place to restart.

The scenes at airports showed how fast a ground stop spreads. At Raleigh-Durham every flight was delayed or canceled, and some passengers were forced off aircraft after boarding. At San Francisco, travelers lined up to speak to airline staff, and flights already delayed by high winds were hit further. Even Saturday college football could be affected, as several teams had not yet flown.

Refund rules matter most to those who cancel. Under DOT rules as one news outlet describes them, a traveler is entitled to a refund if the airline cancels and they choose not to travel, and also for a delay of three or more hours domestically or six or more hours internationally. Credit card refunds are due within seven business days, and cash or check within 20 days. Those details come from a news site rather than from the DOT itself, so they are worth checking against the department's own guidance.

The limits of those rights are as important as the rights. Accepting a rebooking, voucher or future credit can forfeit a cash refund, and hotels, meals and ground transport are not legally guaranteed when an FAA ground stop causes the cancellation. Airlines also need not rebook passengers onto a competitor, and a missed connection alone does not trigger a refund. Tarmac delay rules still apply, with food and water after two hours. Our read is that travelers with a booking should check waiver terms, keep receipts and avoid accepting credit if they want cash back, and that those on separate tickets have less protection.

Freight faces its own version of the problem. UPS paused all flight operations until further notice, and FedEx said it would resume normal operations as soon as the FAA permits. Export cargo would be delayed or canceled and rolled to later flights, and import flights could be held at origin, delayed or diverted, Expeditors International warned. The exposure is large: U.S. airlines move about 61,000 tons of goods daily, by an industry trade group's count. No airline, airport or cargo group has yet published a cost estimate.

Safety versus disruption, and the modernization debate

The case for the stop is simple. Holding aircraft on the ground burns almost no fuel and keeps passengers safer than holding them in the air, a MiGFlug article argues. All flights were accounted for. With controllers unable to talk reliably to pilots, a pause is the cautious option.

The costs are just as concrete.

The outage has sharpened an older argument about aging systems. Susan Hotle, a Virginia Tech professor and former FAA worker, said it shows the need to modernize, because one outage can affect a wide region at once. Duffy asked congressional leaders to act swiftly on a $30.1 billion funding request, after the government approved $12.5 billion last year.

Background pressures are real, but no evidence ties them to this failure. Government audits since 2024 describe a significant share of air traffic control systems as unsustainable or potentially unsustainable, and the FAA entered 2026 about 3,500 controllers short of its targets. The cause of Friday's outage remains under investigation.

How long it may last and two ways to read it

No one has given an end time. Flights would depart as en route facilities recover, and Bryan Bedford told airline CEOs around 6 p.m. that it was unclear when the problem would be resolved. The available reporting does not say whether the stop has ended.

The recovery will outlast the stop itself. Michael McCormick of Embry-Riddle, a former controller, said an outage lasting more than a couple of hours would take airlines and passengers days to recover from, with aircraft and crews in the wrong places. American Airlines expected disruption for the rest of the day, and Expeditors said airlines may cut capacity or apply booking restrictions in the short term.

Our expectation is a restart within a day and normal schedules over the weekend, since carriers must reposition crews and aircraft, though that depends on the fix holding. A longer outage or a second failure would push trouble into next week. The signals to watch are the FAA status page and any extension of airline waivers.

There are two ways to read the event. The likelier lesson is the fragility of shared communications links, because one failure reportedly hit multiple en route centers, much as single cable cuts did at Newark and Houston. The opposing view is that this was an isolated failure with a cause still to be found, and officials have so far seen no sign of a cyberattack or a link to the Microsoft outage the day before.

The safety case for the stop is probably sound, but its cost lands mainly on travelers, since the stop has already run for hours while cancellations will take days to unwind. The investigation will likely center on the communications network and recent changes to it, and the funding request will probably gain momentum, unless a cyber element emerges and shifts the debate. The next concrete marker is an FAA statement naming the failed system.

Sources 20Wired, ABC News, CBS News and 17 more sources

1. Wired (Nov 13, 2026). FAA Grounds All US Flights Until Further Notice. Aarian Marshall
2. ABC News (Nov 14, 2026). FAA issues rare nationwide ground stop; no indication of 'nefarious attack' - ABC News. ABC News
3. CBS News (Nov 13, 2026). FAA issues nationwide ground stop due to "extraordinary circumstances," White House says no indication of "nefarious act" - CBS News. Kierra Frazier
4. CNBC (Nov 14, 2026). FAA grounds departing flights nationwide, citing air traffic communication system outage. Kevin Breuninger and Phil LeBeau
5. National Archives (Sep 10, 2021). Shutting Down the Sky: The Federal Aviation Administration on 9/11. Megan Dwyre
6. brendonbeebe.substack.com (Nov 13, 2026). Every US Nationwide Ground Stop, From 9/11 to Today. Brendon Beebe
7. news9.com (Nov 13, 2026). FAA orders nationwide ground stop until 10 p.m. following communication issue - News9.com. Cassidy Mudd
8. Sourcing Journal (Nov 14, 2026). FAA Nationwide Ground Stop Halts US Flights, Backs Up Air Cargo
9. NBC News (Nov 13, 2026). FAA orders nationwide ground stop for all departing flights for ‘reasons of safety’. Corky Siemaszko
10. ABC7 Los Angeles (Nov 14, 2026). FAA ground stop live updates: What to know as nationwide flights are grounded - ABC7 Los Angeles
11. NBC News (Nov 13, 2026). Live updates: FAA issues sudden and stunning ground stop for all flights. NBC News
12. MiGFlug (Oct 15, 2026). Ground Stop vs Ground Delay Program: What Happens When the FAA Hits Pause. Joseph Duncan
13. ABC13 Houston (Nov 14, 2026). Chicago's O'Hare, Midway airports impacted by nationwide ground stop - ABC13 Houston. Tre Ward
14. ABC News (Nov 14, 2026). FAA ground stop live updates: Some flights taking off, no indication of 'nefarious' act - ABC News. ABC News
15. Hacker News (Nov 14, 2026). FAA Issues National Ground Stop
16. LiveNOW from FOX | Breaking News, Live Events (Nov 13, 2026). The first-ever FAA ground stop in US history was on 9/11: Here's how it unfolded. Mark Richardson
17. Latin Times (Nov 13, 2026). Stranded by the FAA Ground Stop? A Step-by-Step Guide to Rebooking Your Flight and Claiming Your Refund
18. ABC7 San Francisco (Nov 14, 2026). No timeline to restarting flights, DHS Secretary Mullin says - ABC7 San Francisco
19. The Traveler (Apr 10, 2026). FAA’s Air Traffic Controller Shortage Deepens in 2026. Vanessa Buasini
20. Simple Flying (Jun 10, 2026). Why Air Traffic Controllers At The World's Busiest Airports Are Still Underpaid In 2026. Steven Walker

Last updated 14 Nov 2026. This article draws on reporting and data from these sources; links in the text point to the most important ones.