The United States halted every departing flight in the country on Friday afternoon, November 13, after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a rare nationwide ground stop because of a telecommunications outage affecting the centres that guide aircraft between airports. The order, issued at 3:54 p.m. Eastern Time, told all departing traffic at every U.S. airport to stay on the ground until further notice, while planes already in the air were allowed to land.

Source: Gizmodo / FAA, Nov 13, 2026

The FAA said on X that there had been a “temporary telecommunications outage” and that, “out of an abundance of caution all flights have been halted. Every flight has been accounted for and international flights will be handled on a case by case basis.” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy shared an identical statement: “The FAA issued a nationwide ground stop for all U.S. airports following a communication issue impacting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers. FAA technicians are investigating the issue. We will provide immediate updates as we have them.”

Source: Associated Press via NPR Illinois, Nov 13, 2026

The FAA's Air Traffic Control System Command Center issued the order as Advisory 111, citing “extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety.” A later advisory, Advisory 120 issued at 22:46 UTC (5:46 p.m. ET), said the nationwide ground stop remained in effect, identified the reason as a communications failure, and said flights would be allowed to depart as en-route facilities recover, through coordination with the Command Center — a tiered release, not a full lifting. The advisory window ran through 04:30 UTC on Saturday (11:30 p.m. ET), but officials stressed that window was not a promise that departures would resume at that time.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin briefed reporters outside the White House and said there was no sign of an attack. “There is no indication, and we had no reason to believe as of right now that this was a threat to the United States,” Mullin said. “There's no reason for the public to be afraid or scared for your loved ones.” He said every flight was accounted for, that President Donald Trump had been briefed, and that officials had “not discussed any time frame” for fixing the outage, warning it would take some time.

Source: Associated Press via NPR Illinois, Nov 13, 2026

By 6 p.m. Eastern Time, more than 10,000 flights had been delayed and 2,500 had been cancelled in the United States, according to the flight-tracking site FlightAware figures reported by the Associated Press, on top of nearly 7,000 delays on Thursday. At Dallas Fort Worth and Chicago O'Hare, passengers described waiting for hours, in some cases learning of the nationwide grounding from news on their phones while departure boards still showed boarding times.

The FAA has not confirmed what caused the communications failure. CBS News reported around 6:45 p.m. ET that an update pushed on Friday to the private communications network that connects the country's air traffic control system crashed the system, which CBS said is reportedly operated by the technology company L3Harris. That account has not been confirmed by the FAA, and the exact cause remained unclear on Friday evening.

Asked whether the rollout of the FAA's new AI-enhanced routing system, known as SMART, was involved, Mullin said officials were looking at that as part of the review. Air Space Intelligence, the company that makes the tool, said on social media that “the current ground stop is not based on or a result of the SMART system, any product of ASI or our integration with FAA and ATC.” Mullin also said the telecommunications problem did not extend to the entire country in the same way everywhere — “there's two areas inside the United States that are still able to communicate just fine” — and that other countries' aviation systems did not appear to be affected. Nav Canada reassured travellers that Canadian systems were operating and could support diverted aircraft.

A nationwide stop of this scale is exceptionally rare. Several outlets described Friday's order as only the second nationwide ground stop since the September 11, 2001 attacks; the last ground stop of comparable scale was in 2023, when a failure in the NOTAM (Notice to Air Missions) 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.