Flights into and out of Minnesota and nine other Midwest states were temporarily grounded on Thursday, August 18, 2026, due to a system outage at a Minneapolis air traffic control facility, the Federal Aviation Administration confirmed. The affected ATC center manages air traffic across a 330,000 square mile region.
States impacted included Minnesota, Michigan, Kansas, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Wisconsin. While the Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport (MSP) itself was not the site of the outage, it experienced significant operational delays amid the regional disruption.
On Thursday evening, delays at MSP averaged 90 minutes. Additional delays were expected
to continue into the remainder of the evening at airports throughout the affected Midwest states.
The outage disrupted radar and air traffic control systems at the Minneapolis air traffic control center. These systems later came back online, but flight disruptions persisted at multiple facilities throughout the region.
As a result, flights across Minnesota and the surrounding Midwest states were either held on the ground or diverted to other airports, causing widespread travel delays. Passengers at MSP faced average delays of an hour and a half during the evening hours on August 18.
