FAA Ground Stop - All US Departing Flights Cancelled

J

jdog

Senior Member.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-new...p-departing-flights-reasons-safety-rcna609247

Ground stop ordered for all airports nationwide for 'reasons of safety'


The Federal Aviation Administration on Friday ordered a nationwide ground stop on all departing flights "due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety."

The unusual alert contained no other information beyond stating that "all departing traffic should remain ground stopped until further notice."
 
jdog said:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-new...p-departing-flights-reasons-safety-rcna609247

Ground stop ordered for all airports nationwide for 'reasons of safety'


The Federal Aviation Administration on Friday ordered a nationwide ground stop on all departing flights "due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety."

The unusual alert contained no other information beyond stating that "all departing traffic should remain ground stopped until further notice."
Click to expand...
Per Flightradar24:
External Quote:

Issued by the FAA just moments ago, ALL US airports are currently ground stopped. This means NO flights may depart for US airports. Flights already in the air will be allowed to land. This is related to an FAA equipment outage.
 
1794606400631.png


Quite visible in FR24, all the airports have only incoming flights, and there are clusters of planes waiting to depart
 
Lots of speculation.
  • FAA quoted as caused by communications equipment failure
  • SMART AI tool set to be rolled out to more installations
  • national weather radar outage
As usual, this is a "fog of war" situation that is low on facts; the engineers wrestling with the problem don't have a lot of time for PR right now, which means facts are bound to emerge later.
 
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In Boston only 1 plane has departed since 20:36Z and it was a transatlantic one, which seems like they may still be allowed to leave, maybe if they're departing from the coast and immediately leaving the US. Though this one in particular has also already been delayed over an hour so may have also already boarded. The aircraft had been in Boston on time so wasn't delayed for that reason. It looks like the disruption began in the few minutes after 20:36Z, which may be related to why this 20:40Z scheduled departure was delayed but eventually allowed to leave. JFK's last flight was 20:35Z. Even though it's a coastal airport with lots of transatlantic traffic, no flights have departed since then. EDIT: similarly, Newark's last departure was 20:35Z.

screenshot-2026-11-13T165507.png
 
The difference is that Boston's KZBW borders on Canada's Moncton FIR, so maybe they just phoned them for the handoff. NYC departing aircraft do require more ATC communication to get them out of US airspace, and ATC is probably very busy keeping track of the aircraft still in the air with what appears to be limited resources.
ATOP Controlled Airspace.png

Also, the transoceanic flight tracks are fairly standardized.

A ground stop also means that aircraft will be arriving but not departing, which means "parking space" at the airports will become scarce. Sending an aircraft off instead of bringing it back and occupying a gate may have been worth the extra overhead (including getting FAA to sign off on it) to send it on its way.
 
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As @Mendel said, the groundings are currently being attributed to a "telecommunications issue".

What systems might be involved and where don't seem to have been revealed yet. I'm guessing there will be more detailed explanations in the next day or two, and lots of speculation in the meantime.

BBC News, US & Canada, "Flights grounded across US as homeland security secretary says no indication of an attack", 13 Nov. 2026, editor Dulcie Lee
External Quote:

-Flights have been grounded across the US due to an air traffic control "communication issue", Transport Secretary Sean Duffy says
-There's no indication that this is an attack against the US, the homeland security secretary says, adding this isn't "another 9/11"
-US aviation officials earlier issued an order to ground all flights due to "extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety"
-Several major airports confirm the ground stop
-There's currently no indication of when the order will be lifted

Update at 22:08 UTC (17:08 EST),
External Quote:

Issue not connected to Microsoft outage - Mullin [US Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin]

Mullin says the focus at the moment is on restoring communication and to "get all the flights down" on the ground.
He adds there isn't "any reason" to connect today's issues with Microsoft and the current outage.
"We have not discussed any time frame," he says when asked about the potential length of the issues.
"It's going to take some time."

Further update at 22:22 (17:22 EST), Mullin repeats there's no sign of malicious activity being responsible.
External Quote:

US Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has just sought to reassure the public that the nationwide air traffic outage wasn't caused by a "nefarious act".
He said repeatedly that this "isn't another 9/11".

But beyond that, he made clear there are more questions than answers about what's going on.

The administration is working to address what he said was a "telecommunications outage". But he acknowledged the government doesn't know what caused it or how long it'll take to fix.
Mullin also said that he couldn't "rule anything out" as a reason for the outage, despite saying that there was no current indication of an attack.
 
Mendel said:
The difference is that Boston's KZBW borders on Canada's Moncton FIR, so maybe they just phoned them for the handoff. NYC departing aircraft do require more ATC communication to get them out of US airspace, and ATC is probably very busy keeping track of the aircraft still in the air with what appears to be limited resources.

Also, the transoceanic flight tracks are fairly standardized.

A ground stop also means that aircraft will be arriving but not departing, which means "parking space" at the airports will become scarce. Sending an aircraft off instead of bringing it back and occupying a gate may have been worth the extra overhead (including getting FAA to sign off on it) to send it on its way.
Click to expand...
Ah yeah that could be the reason. They fly basically directly into Canadian airspace, no other US regions on the way, and the sky up here is clearer (especially now) and those transatlantic flights are pretty easy predetermined lines. Another BOS flight departed at 22:21Z, transatlantic flight LH423 to Frankfurt. JFK did just let AZ609 go to Rome at 22:30Z which has to cross over Massachusetts on the way. But Atlanta, Newark, JFK, Dulles haven't let anything go.
 
Joined by: US National Weather Service reports nationwide internet, communications issues
External Quote:

The US National Weather Service ‌said on Friday it was experiencing nationwide internet and ⁠communications problems that could prevent users from accessing products on its websites or cause outdated ‌information ⁠to be displayed.
Technicians were working to resolve the ⁠problems as soon as possible, ⁠the NWS said in ⁠a statement.
With apologies to @JMartJr, certain conspiracy-minded folks are going bonkers over this: It's either Iran, or Russia, or China, or our own government hiding something in the skies, or one or more rogue AIs.

Haven't seen anyone blame Bigfoot yet, but maybe he's on our side and is going to provide the tech support we didn't know we needed.
 
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Also just saw a plane bound for Boston divert to Charlotte (CLT) -- maybe unrelated, but I wonder of some airports might actually start to run out of places to put more planes?
 
Yeah, seems like a very small number of international flights heading out over the ocean. Nothing domestic. Here's Denver right now.

1794612396035.png
 
Mendel said:
What are the odds that this would happen on Friday the 13th? :-p
Click to expand...
I'm reminded of my favorite GURPS adventure, Flight 13:
External Quote:

Ladies and gentlemen, we regret to announce the Flight 13 will not be proceeding to your destination at this time. In fact, we won't be proceeding at all. And neither will you.

Suddenly, the routine of air travel becomes anything but routine. Only the wits and courage of the passengers, and the minimal equipment they can carry, give any chance for survival in a world gone mad.
 
jdog said:
Joined by: US National Weather Service reports nationwide internet, communications issues
External Quote:

The US National Weather Service ‌said on Friday it was experiencing nationwide internet and ⁠communications problems that could prevent users from accessing products on its websites or cause outdated ‌information ⁠to be displayed.
Technicians were working to resolve the ⁠problems as soon as possible, ⁠the NWS said in ⁠a statement.
With apologies to @JMartJr, certain conspiracy-minded folks are going bonkers over this: It's either Iran, or Russia, or China, or our own government hiding something in the skies, or one or more rogue AIs.

Haven't seen anyone blame Bigfoot yet, but maybe he's on our side and is going to provide the tech support we didn't know we needed.
Click to expand...
The website with that alert has been showing a long out of date alert from 2025. Your link has the correction now.

External Quote:
The US ‌National Weather Service said on Friday its radars were operating normally and its ⁠radar website was fully operational.
The NWS said outdated content from isolated webpages had been circulating but that there was no ‌radar ⁠outage.
Unfortunately thanks to events of that year the US federal government has an awful lot of websites that just went dead over the course of 2025 with 404 errors and long out of date breaking news all over the place.
 
Transportation Secretary Duffy and DHS Secretary Mullin just held a press conference at the White House. The main points Duffy is making in the portion I've watched is that they need a bunch more funding to implement major technology modernization, and that the failure was in a very old legacy system that is decades old and that newer systems were not the cause (contrary to speculation about a particular new system called SMART which provides advanced flight planning assistance). I missed the early part but FR24 provided one earlier statement which is that a system got overwhelmed and it caused a cascading failure across the network.

EDIT: youtube link

External Quote:
Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy says that tonights nationwide ground stop was due to switches and routers that were overloaded and shut down when they began providing inconsistent data.

Source: https://x.com/flightradar24/status/2121417701885390932


I'm getting a little deja vu because just a few hours ago the head of platforms at Microsoft put out a preliminary statement on the cause of the Microsoft service outage from yesterday through today, and he described it as a similar 'thundering herd' situation where small failures cause an escalating set of worse failures that can spread and makes it hard to recover because the system continues getting hammered the whole time while you're trying to bring it back up.

External Quote:
I want to share what we know so far. This was not a cyberattack or an issue caused by AI tooling. Our amazing team was able to work through a very challenging situation to restore service.

Our investigation points to technical challenges and failure modes (cascading failures + thundering herds at our network perimeter) that made recovery more difficult than normal. I'm working closely with the engineering team to complete the full post-mortem. We will publish the post-mortem shortly covering the step-by-step timeline and our many repair items to avoid similar outages in the future.

We take our responsibility to our customers seriously and will do everything we can to learn from this and prevent it going forward.

Source: https://x.com/clamanna/status/2121363062058070344
 
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Timeline:

Source: https://www.reddit.com/user/phillyt84/comments/1xvqkre/faa_national_ground_stop_advisory_111_the/


From the WH briefing:
External Quote:
About 01:46 (8:46p) Mullin: "What it appears to be right now is, as Secretary Duffy and FAA was going in and putting patches into the system, they were putting new equipment and new technology. And that new equipment, new technology ... it was overwhelming the older system, which is why Secretary Duffy made it very clear, the patchwork doesn't work. We need one complete system."

About 01:55 (8:55p) Duffy, asked whether FAA patching caused the outage: "I want to clarify that. This is our old TDM analog system that got overloaded with data and started to experience these issues." He said the TRACONs and centers "that have been upgraded to digital, to IP. Those did not experience these issues."
 
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