This story updates Awaaz Punjab's earlier report on the FAA's nationwide ground stop, imposed at 3:54 p.m. ET on Friday. That halt has now been lifted and departures can resume. Read the earlier ground-stop report
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said on Friday evening, November 13, that airplane departures can resume after it lifted the nationwide ground stop it had imposed in the afternoon because of communications problems, the Associated Press reported. The rare stop lasted about four hours and had grounded departing flights at every U.S. airport.
Source: Associated Press via Now Georgia, Nov 13, 2026
The ground stop was imposed at 3:54 p.m. Eastern Time after a telecommunications outage hit the Air Route Traffic Control Centers — the 22 regional centers that direct planes en route between airports and handle high-altitude traffic. Friday's restrictions were imposed "due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety," according to the FAA notice cited by AP.
Source: Associated Press via Now Georgia, Nov 13, 2026
"Old switches, old routers" — what officials say went wrong
At a press conference on Friday night, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the issue appears to be old technology. "We have old switches, old routers. We use 1980s little copper lines. It's an old system that went down and went down everywhere. It got overloaded," Duffy said, according to NPR. Duffy said flights would resume but would take time to clear.
Source: NPR via WHRO, updated Nov 13, 2026, 9:15 p.m. EST
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who joined Duffy at the press conference, said there was no evidence the outage was an attack. "We have seen zero evidence this is a cyber attack," Mullin said, according to NPR. Australia's AAP, reporting with Reuters, likewise said the U.S. aviation authority had lifted its order to ground all flights across the country. The FAA has not issued a formal root-cause finding; accounts pointing to a specific private network or vendor remain unconfirmed by the agency.
Source: AAP with Reuters, Nov 13, 2026
Hundreds diverted, thousands stranded
At least 827 flights were diverted during the stop. As of 7:05 p.m. EST, 670 flights had been sent back to the airport they took off from and 157 were redirected to a different airport, according to Cirium, an aviation analytics company, figures reported by AP. Some 11,000 flights carrying more than 1.5 million passengers had been scheduled to take off from U.S. airports after 4 p.m. EST, AP reported.
Source: Associated Press via Now Georgia, Nov 13, 2026
As of 8 p.m. EST, more than 10,000 flights had been delayed on Friday and 5,000 had been cancelled in the United States, according to the flight-tracking site FlightAware, on top of nearly 7,000 delays on Thursday, NPR reported. At Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, passenger Regina Harling told NPR she waited hours past her departure time before learning of the nationwide grounding from news on her phone, while a sign in front of her still said her flight was boarding in 16 minutes.
Source: NPR via WHRO, updated Nov 13, 2026, 9:15 p.m. EST
Lifting the stop does not restore normal operations at once: aircraft and crews are out of position, and officials said clearing the backlog will take time, with delays and cancellations expected to spill into Saturday and the weekend. Travellers — including Punjabi and Indian passengers connecting through U.S. hubs — should check their flight status directly with their airline before leaving for the airport.
This was only the second nationwide ground stop since the September 11, 2001 attacks, and the first since January 2023, when a malfunction in the FAA's NOTAM system, which alerts pilots and airports to real-time hazards, halted U.S. airports. The FAA later found that outage was caused when contract workers inadvertently deleted critical files — a reminder that Friday's cause, too, will need a formal finding before it can be stated as fact.