At 8:15 p.m. this Friday (Washington time, 2:15 a.m. already in Spain), and after almost five hours of total interruption, the American Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) lifted the total suspension of operations at all airports in the country, a drastic measure that had only been resorted to twice since the attacks on the Twin Towers.
The cause, according to Transport Minister Sean Duffy, was "an incredibly old air traffic control system" that crashed during an upgrade. No cyberattacks, boycotts, attacks or problems with Microsoft services or the new Artificial Intelligence system that is being extended to air control services.
The chaos has been absolute from coast to coast of the country during the afternoon, with more than 10,000 flights delayed, at least 5,000 canceled and the announcement that the weekend is going to be very complicated to try to return to normality, with more than a million and a half passengers affected, many of them stranded in saturated facilities and far from their destinations. "I hope that tomorrow we will start to see much greater improvement," Duffy said in an appearance at the White House late in the evening.
It all started shortly after 3:30 p.m. with a statement in which the federal agency ordered a complete stoppage, appealing to "extraordinary circumstances and security reasons," but without giving many details. The aircraft that were about to take off had to return to the parking area and the majority of those that had just left returned to their destination. Except in Hawaii or Alaska. "The public was never in danger, there have been no lives at risk, the FAA was prepared to handle it and made decisions with an abundance of caution," the Secretary of Homeland Security stated at the conclusion of the incident.
"A nationwide ground stop order has been issued following a communication problem affecting all Air Route Air Traffic Control Centers. FAA technicians are investigating the problem. We will provide immediate updates as soon as we have them," Sean Duffy, the Trump administration's Secretary of Transportation, immediately explained. "This is not another 9/11. This is a disruption in telecommunications," Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin wanted to reassure. "So far, there is no indication that this is a malicious attack against us. For now, it is only a telecommunications interruption," he added without actually ruling out any scenario.
According to Air Current, the problem began in the Chicago area and spread eastward. Suddenly, incidents began to multiply in the frequencies and radar capabilities of air traffic control. The pilots who are in the air at this moment had to resort on many occasions to the emergency frequency that is used as a last resort.
According to the CBS network, which cited multiple sources, the problem was due to "an update to the private communications network that connects the air traffic control system caused the system to restart. When the FAA's telecommunications infrastructure restarted, it went down, causing communications to be interrupted."
At the press conference, Minister Duffy confirmed that "the solution chosen gives us a good indication that this was an issue with the legacy network that failed." The new updates overloaded the existing outdated system, crashing the team. "And it will continue to fail," they warned.
By then Microsoft had already indicated that it had no indication that the problems were related to the global interruption of some of its services, from which it is still recovering. But even so, for a few minutes the country panicked, with rumors about the possibility of other services beginning to fail and that everything seen this week (just yesterday there was an accident in a river near New Orleans between two ships), the threats suffered by planes in Europe or those from members of the Government from Iran were part of an undefined whole.
Markwayne Mullin, Secretary of Homeland Security, had assured in a first appearance that the Government had no reason to think that it was a cyber attack. "So far, there are no indications that this is a malicious attack against us. For now, it is only an interruption in telecommunications," although he did not rule out any cause.
The state of infrastructure in the US is one of the most worrying issues, which only seems to reopen when misfortunes occur. It happened this spring, when a cable cut near New Jersey caused a problem in air control in the New York region. It occurred after the accident between a plane and a helicopter in Washington in January 2025. And it has already been reactivated, with a message from the Republican group in the Senate regretting that an air control center has not been built in the United States "since the time of Lyndon B. Johnson", in the 60s of the last century.
Last year, Congress allocated the Department of Transportation $12.5 billion to begin modernizing the nation's air traffic control infrastructure. But Trump's team demands much more. "What we have is an incredibly old air traffic control system. The president, for the last year, has been asking Congress to fully fund the entire construction of an entirely new air traffic control system. They must give us the money to fix it," he urged. During these two years of the Trump administration, both houses of Congress were controlled by his party.
Just this week, the FAA expanded the use of an artificial intelligence (AI) tool to streamline processes and advise air traffic controllers and facilitate traffic management throughout the national airspace, despite complaints from the union representing air traffic controllers that it regrets not having participated in the design or testing of the AI-based system.
The Federal Aviation Administration maintains that the $875 million SMART system works and is effective. In tests carried out "it has helped redirect 180 flights since its implementation in Washington DC airspace on September 21" with an average saving "of 10 minutes per flight and almost 80 gallons of fuel per flight", and is confident that these results will be replicated nationally.
The system, according to Ars Technica, combines "weather patterns, flight routes, traffic flow and control personnel metrics," but leaves the final decision on whether or not to accept SMART's suggestions in the hands of controllers.
The last time a closure of this caliber occurred (it was then the first major crisis since 9/11 in 2001), was in January 2023, due to a computer failure in the NOTAM system, which communicates essential messages for air safety to pilots and airlines, such as the status or closure of runways at airports, construction, technical problems and other risks. Without reliable access to that information, the FAA decided to halt the takeoffs as a precaution. The incident took almost two hours to resolve.
Subsequent investigation concluded that files had been accidentally deleted during synchronization efforts between the primary and backup databases. The FAA said it found no evidence of a cyberattack, but the incident still caused thousands of delays and cancellations and highlighted the vulnerability of some US aviation technology systems.
