On August 18, 2026, flights arriving into and departing from Minnesota and nine other Midwest states were held on the ground or diverted due to a system outage at a Minneapolis air traffic control facility.
Minneapolis Air Traffic Control Outage Impacting Midwest Region
The outage involved radar and air traffic control systems at the Minneapolis air traffic control facility, which manages air traffic over 330,000 square miles of the Midwest region.
Delays at Minneapolis–Saint Paul International and Regional Airports
Although Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport (MSP) was not the location of the outage, flights there experienced average delays of 90 minutes on August 18, 2026, Thursday evening. Additional ongoing delays occurred at airports across Michigan, Kansas, Missouri,
North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Wisconsin as systems came back online but disruptions continued.
