FAA's Nationwide Ground Stop Leaves Thousands of Flights Canceled as Airline Disruptions Spill Into the Weekend

U.S. airlines canceled thousands more flights on Saturday, Nov. 14, 2026, as they worked to recover from a nationwide ground stop that the Federal Aviation Administration imposed on Friday afternoon after a communications failure at several air traffic control centers. The roughly four-hour halt was the longest nationwide shutdown of U.S. air traffic since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Reuters reported.

More than 3,000 U.S. flights had been canceled and close to 1,000 delayed as of 5:45 a.m. Eastern time on Saturday, according to flight-tracking site FlightAware, CNBC reported. Those figures came on top of about 9,000 U.S. cancellations and more than 7,000 delays on Friday, although CNBC noted that some of Friday's disruptions were due to bad weather.

What happened

In a brief statement on Friday, the FAA said it had issued a nationwide ground stop for all U.S. airports following communication issues affecting multiple Air Route Traffic Control Centers, the facilities that manage aircraft flying at high altitude between airports. The agency said its technicians were investigating and described the information as preliminary.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told reporters at the White House that the trouble began at 3:36 p.m. Eastern time, when the centers experienced instability in radar and communications systems. He said switches and routers became overloaded with data and began producing inconsistent information, prompting officials to shut the system down. Duffy said controllers never completely lost radar or communications and were able to land thousands of aircraft safely, according to Reuters.

U.S. airspace reopened at 8:15 p.m. Eastern time. Duffy said departures would resume gradually. "It's going to be slow," he said. Before clearing flights, the FAA said in a late Friday statement that it had "thoroughly tested our systems to confirm they were stable and that operations remain reliable," according to CNBC.

Two airline officials told Reuters the outage appeared to affect a telecommunications network overseen by L3Harris Technologies that carries radio frequencies used by controllers to talk with pilots. L3Harris did not respond to Reuters' request for comment.

No sign of a cyberattack so far

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said there was "zero evidence" so far that the failure resulted from a cyberattack or a rogue artificial intelligence system, though investigators had not ruled out either possibility. "It appears this was mechanically driven. However, we're still looking," Mullin said, adding that the National Security Agency was working with his department on the investigation. Duffy said he and Mullin met with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office to discuss the outage.

The only other nationwide ground stop since 2001 came in January 2023, when the FAA halted domestic departures for about 90 minutes, Reuters noted.

Airlines and passengers

By 11:30 p.m. on Friday, nearly 10,000 flights had been canceled, including more than 2,200 each at Delta Air Lines and American Airlines and about 1,800 at United Airlines, according to Flightradar24 data cited by Reuters. The plane-tracking website said some aircraft at major airports had waited more than five hours for a gate. Duffy said tens of thousands of passengers were stranded at airports around the country.

Because the carriers were not responsible for the FAA system failure, U.S. airlines will not be required to compensate stranded passengers, Reuters reported. Airlines offered travel waivers to affected customers, according to CNBC. American Airlines said it was prioritizing flights to international destinations and to smaller cities outside its main hubs in order to position aircraft and crews for a faster recovery.

Saturday is typically one of the lightest days of the week for airline schedules, and carriers were deploying spare aircraft and crews to reposition fleets ahead of the Thanksgiving travel period. Around 3 million people would typically be scheduled to fly on a Saturday, according to aviation data firm Cirium. The disruption also affected professional and college sports teams, and the Southeastern Conference said some football games had been moved to Sunday, CNBC reported.

Market reaction and funding debate

The ground stop was announced in the final minutes of Friday's regular U.S. trading session. The NYSE Arca airline index closed down 1.4%, Reuters reported. In after-hours trading, shares of American, United and Delta fell between 1% and 2%, while JetBlue Airways dropped about 3%.

Duffy blamed the failure on aging infrastructure and said Congress had not funded a new system that could prevent such outages, calling for $50 billion to modernize air traffic control. "What we have is an incredibly old air traffic control system," he said. "Give us the money to fix it." Earlier on Friday, before the outage, the White House and the Department of Transportation had urged Congress to approve $30.1 billion to upgrade the nation's airports and air traffic control infrastructure, according to Reuters.

The U.S. air traffic control system has for years faced problems with outdated equipment and a shortage of several thousand controllers, issues that airline executives have repeatedly cited as a source of costly disruptions. Aviation analysts told Reuters that the grounding could disrupt airline schedules for several days.