US halts all departing flights for hours after air traffic communications failure
The US Federal Aviation Administration grounded all departures from American airports for over four hours on Friday evening after communications problems at several air traffic control centers. The transportation secretary blamed outdated equipment, and nearly 10,000 flights have already been cancelled.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the US agency that oversees national air traffic, stopped all departing flights from American airports for several hours on Friday evening. The cause was a communications failure at multiple air traffic control centers. The disruption continues into the weekend: by late Friday, nearly 10,000 flights to and from US airports had been cancelled.
How the restrictions unfolded
The ground stop took effect at 3:54 p.m. Eastern Time and was lifted at 8:15 p.m. Aircraft already in the air were allowed to land. According to the flight-tracking service Flightradar24, at the lowest point only 336 flights were operating over the US, compared with more than 3,600 at a typical time.
Delta and American Airlines each cancelled more than 2,200 flights. Travelers are advised to check their flight status closely in the coming days.
Explanations for the cause
At a White House press conference, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy blamed outdated equipment. He said routers were overloaded with data and began giving contradictory information, so the FAA had to shut the system down. Duffy referred to "small copper wires from the 1980s" and said none of the newer solutions had failed.
Sources cited by CBS News link the problem to an update on FTI (FAA Telecommunications Infrastructure), a private communications network managed by L3Harris, which allegedly made the system restart and crash. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said new security patches apparently overloaded the routers of the old system.
The weakness was known: a security audit in November 2023 found the FTI network to be outdated because it relies on TDM technology, which modern telecommunications infrastructure no longer supports.
Link to other incidents
The same day also saw a global Microsoft outage affecting Xbox services and rail traffic in Germany. Mullin categorically denied any connection between the two incidents. He added that nothing currently points to a cyberattack, though the investigation continues.
Duffy is asking Congress for $50 billion to fully modernize air traffic control technology and warns that similar incidents will recur without it.
