Breaking Public Safety

FAA lifts nationwide ground stop after longest shutdown since 9/11; cancellations stretch into the weekend

United States • November 13, 2026 • By Press Pass USA

Air traffic controllers at radar consoles in an air traffic control center

File photo: Canadian Air Traffic Control Association

The Federal Aviation Administration lifted a nationwide ground stop Friday evening after a communications failure halted departing flights across the United States for more than four hours — the longest shutdown of U.S. airspace since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The FAA issued the ground stop at about 3:54 p.m. Eastern time, ordering flights not to take off "due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety." It lifted the order at 8:15 p.m. Eastern, and departing flights began to resume. Flights already in the air were allowed to continue to their destinations throughout the stop.

The disruption was enormous. FlightAware counted about 6,500 flights cancelled and about 8,800 delayed as of 9:15 p.m. Friday, while Reuters reported more than 4,700 cancellations and 10,000 delays on Friday alone, with 700 flights already cancelled for Saturday. FlightRadar24 put the Friday toll at 6,600 cancellations and 8,600 delays, with another 1,500 cancellations already on the books for Sunday. Aviation analytics firm Cirium estimated about 1.5 million passengers were stranded. By 7:05 p.m., 827 flights had been diverted, according to Cirium — 670 back to the airports they had departed from and 157 to other airports.

Administration officials said new technology being added to the nation's air traffic control system overloaded antiquated systems and caused "intermittent" communications and radar gaps, according to The Associated Press. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said overloaded network routers were to blame. The FAA described the cause as a telecommunications outage affecting Air Route Traffic Control Centers, which handle high-altitude flights across the country.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said officials had seen no evidence of a cyberattack, and that no one was in any danger as more than 3,000 flights were safely landed during the stop. Duffy said he could not guarantee it would not happen again.

The ground stop was the first nationwide halt of departures since January 2023, when a failure in the system that alerts pilots to safety hazards grounded flights for about 90 minutes, and the longest since the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. The National Weather Service also experienced nationwide internet and communications issues on Friday; it said just before 6:15 p.m. that its radar and website were fully operational.

Reopening the airspace does not mean schedules are back to normal. Duffy warned that flights would not resume immediately, and that restoring departures would depend on the availability of pilots and flight attendants. More than 1,300 flights have already been cancelled for Saturday, and airlines face a weekend of rebooking stranded passengers.

Sources: The Associated Press, "Trump administration blames 'overloaded' systems for ground stop after FAA lets flights resume" (Nov. 13, 2026); Reuters, figures on Friday cancellations and delays (Nov. 13, 2026); NPR, "What we know about the FAA nationwide ground stop" (Nov. 13, 2026); FlightAware and FlightRadar24 flight data as reported Nov. 13–14, 2026.