A temporary system outage at the Minneapolis air traffic control facility on August 21, 2026, caused flights into and out of Minnesota and nine other Midwest states to be diverted or held on the ground, the Federal Aviation Administration confirmed.
The outage affected radar and air traffic control systems at the Minneapolis facility, which manages air traffic across 330,000 square miles in the Midwest region. Flights across multiple states, including Michigan, Kansas, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Wisconsin, experienced groundings and reroutes during the disruption.
Although the Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport (MSP) was not directly impacted by the
system failure, flight delays there averaged 90 minutes on the evening of August 21. Disruptions were expected to continue at MSP and other regional airports throughout the evening.
The Federal Aviation Administration reported that the radar and air traffic control system outage led to the ongoing flight disruptions. Systems at the Minneapolis air traffic control facility later came back online, but delays persisted across affected airports in the Midwest.
