The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) grounded all flights nationwide Friday afternoon, bringing virtually all air travel in the U.S. to a screeching halt.
The nationwide ground stop was issued at 3:54 p.m EST. In an advisory, the FAA – the agency responsible for overseeing all U.S. aviation – cited “extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety” for the stoppage.
U.S. airlines were canceling flights by the hundreds – and delaying thousands more flights – into Friday evening as the ground stop dragged on. American Airlines said it expected “disruption to our schedule for the rest of the day, depending on the length of the FAA’s nationwide ground stop.”
It’s just the second nationwide ground stop ordered by the federal government since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Air travel was briefly paused by an outage of a critical aviation communications system in early 2023.
The cause of the outage on Friday was unclear, as was the timeline for getting flights back in the air. Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy Friday posted on social media, faulting “a communication issue impacting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers” for the outage and adding that FAA technicians were investigating the issue.
A ground stop means that no new flights can take off, though flights already in the air can be permitted to land. The FAA’s notice said that inbound international flights will handled on a case-by-case basis.
FlightRadar24, a popular flight tracking website, says there are currently 3,100 flights airborne bound for U.S. airports as of Friday afternoon.
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