The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a nationwide ground stop at about 4 p.m. Eastern Time on November 13, 2026, suspending all departing flights across the United States for more than four hours. The ground stop was lifted at 8:15 p.m. ET the same day, after disrupting over 10,000 flights and impacting approximately 1.5 million passengers.
Cause of the Ground Stop
The FAA attributed the ground stop to a temporary telecommunications outage caused by overloaded routers carrying critical data. This failure affected several Air Route Traffic Control Centers responsible for managing aircraft at high altitudes over U.S. airspace. The communication breakdown forced the FAA to
halt departures nationwide as a precautionary measure to maintain safety.
Airline and Flight Operations Impact
JetBlue Airways responded by canceling the remainder of its November 13 flights except those serving European routes, and also cancelled some flights scheduled for November 14. International departures from U.S. coastal hubs resumed prior to 6 p.m. ET on November 13. Inbound international flights were managed individually due to the disruption. Approximately 600 flights were diverted during the outage, including 104 flights rerouted to alternate airports.
Traveler Disruptions
The ground stop caused widespread travel disruptions at major U.S. airports including JFK, LaGuardia, Newark, Chicago O’Hare, Midway, and Orlando. Hundreds of thousands of
travelers had their plans interrupted, with some sports teams also affected. Airports faced operational challenges managing grounded aircraft. Flight delays and cancellations were expected to continue into the weekend following the outage.
Official Statements on the Outage
U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy confirmed that telecommunications routers were overloaded with data and “went down,” leading to the failure. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin stated there was no indication the outage was a cyberattack, describing it as a “mechanically driven” issue. The FAA emphasized the ground stop was implemented “out of an abundance of caution” and that flights would resume “as en route traffic facilities recover, through
coordination with the air traffic control system.”
Context on U.S. Air Traffic Control Challenges
This was only the second nationwide ground stop since the September 11, 2001 attacks; the previous one occurred in January 2023 due to issues with a pilot alert system. Aging infrastructure and staffing shortages have contributed to repeated air traffic control disruptions in recent years. In 2025, an equipment failure at Newark Liberty International Airport caused major delays, while in September 2026, accidental fiber cable cuts disrupted flights into Newark and Philadelphia. Secretary Duffy called for increased funding to modernize and overhaul air traffic control technology.
