A Nationwide Ground Stop

Briefing|A Nationwide Ground Stop

Federal aviation authorities announced a rare nationwide ground stop just before 4 p.m. Eastern, immediately halting all departing flights at airports across the U.S. Follow here for the latest updates.

Sean Duffy, the secretary of transportation, said the cause of the outage was “a communication issue” affecting all air traffic control systems. Markwayne Mullin, the secretary of homeland security, said the government did not suspect foul play, though they were not ruling out any cause. “This isn’t another 9/11,” he said. “This is a telecommunication outage.”

There were several thousand flights scheduled for the remainder of the day, according to flight tracking websites. Some planes deboarded; some passengers were told to go home. Officials said that inbound flights were being managed on a case-by-case basis.

The longer the ground stop lasts, the more widespread its effects will be. Delays could soon turn into cancellations, which could cascade throughout the weekend.

Today’s ground stop is only the third nationwide in decades. The most recent one was in 2023, when contractors unintentionally deleted files related to an alert system. Before that, the last ground stop was on Sept. 11, 2001, after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.