The American aviation regulator (FAA) ordered this Friday, November 13, the cessation of all domestic flights due to a communication problem. U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced on X that the communications problem “affects all air traffic control centers on airline routes. FAA technicians are investigating the problem.
For its part, the FAA mentioned “exceptional circumstances”. “All departing traffic must remain grounded until further notice,” the official FAA advisory said, adding that landings of incoming international flights would be handled on a case-by-case basis. According to flight tracking tool FlightAware, nearly 7,000 flights have so far been delayed or canceled. A total of 30,000 departures and arrivals were planned for the rest of Friday when the notice was published.
In press releases, both United Airlines and American Airlines indicated that current flights continue, but that no new flights will take off as long as the grounding measure remains in effect. According to our colleagues from the New York Times, present at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, a United Airlines employee told travelers to go home. In the meantime, major airports are gradually finding themselves saturated with grounded planes - authorities will probably divert some flights to other less congested airports.
The Secretary of Homeland Security of the United States, Markwayne Mullin, for his part declared that “we are able to communicate on certain levels” and that “Donald Trump has been informed”. “This is not another September 11,” he added, emphasizing, however, that this “is not going to resolve itself and return to normal in the space of an hour,” he said. “It’s going to take time. But, again, everyone is safe. All thefts are traced and there is no reason for the public to be concerned.”
The FBI, which is currently ruling out the possibility of a cyberattack, says it is investigating to “determine whether a software update is the cause of the major outage.” Microsoft, for its part, affirmed that the immobilization of the planes is not linked to the outage of its Outlook services, which occurred on Thursday. Radars and radio frequencies are affected by outages, according to CNN.
The National Weather Service also announced that it was having communications and internet problems, although it was not known whether this was related to the FAA advisory.
The grounding order is already having effects at airports in neighboring countries. That of Pearson, in Toronto, informed that it would not receive any flights from the United States this Friday. In Mexico City, Benito Juarez International Airport urged travelers to check their flight status as some flights were affected.
This suspension of flights comes on the same day as the White House requested Congress for an additional $30.1 billion in funding to modernize the air traffic control system in the United States. The Trump administration had already presented in May 2025 a plan for “complete modernization” of the air traffic control (ATC) system, some of which dated from the 1960s or still used floppy disks.
Friday's outage also comes just days after the FAA announced the nationwide deployment of an artificial intelligence tool intended to help air traffic controllers avoid delays. This tool was presented for the first time two months earlier in airports in the Washington region. That day, hundreds of flights were also grounded due to communication problems with air traffic control services. An electrical fault caused a system outage and it was discovered that contractors had accidentally cut a fiber optic cable that was intended to serve as a backup.
Air traffic controllers depend on constant communication with pilots to manage their flights. Without reliable communication, allowing planes to take off is risky. Before issuing its advisory, the FAA suspended flights at O'Hare and Midway airports in Chicago, citing "equipment problems."
This is only the third time that the FAA has ordered the grounding of all flights nationwide: the first time was on September 11, 2001, following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, and the second time was on January 11, 2023, due to a failure of the alert system intended to inform pilots of safety problems. This last immobilization lasted some 90 minutes.
