The FAA notice
Photo: Screencap
U.S. national airspace shut down unexpectedly shortly afer 3:30 p.m. this afternoon, as aircraft waiting to take off at airports across the country were informed that the FAA had put in place a “national ground stop.” The shutdown hit air travel during one of the busiest times of the week, as business travelers return home from work trips and vacationers head out to their destinations. Inbound aircraft continued to land normally.
Over the air-traffic-control app ATC.com, controllers could be heard informing flight crew that they had received a message stating “all aircraft, all airports ground stopped until 22Z (5 p.m. EST) due to a nationwide equipment outage.”
At the site LiveATC.net, an American pilot could be heard saying that the company had told its aircraft to return to their gates, implying that they expect the delay to be prolonged. Other aircraft continued to line up on taxiways for eventual clearance to take off.
The outage apparently affected Air Route Traffic Control Centers, which handle aircraft during the cruise phase in between airports, but there was no indication of what might be causing the problem, and at time of writing it wasn’t clear if planes in this phase of flight were having trouble getting or receiving transmissions over the radio.
CNN reports that two law-enforcement officials said a cyberattack was unlikely to have caused the outage. There has also been speculation that a new AI system integrated into the FAA might be responsible, but that system, called SMART, is used for planning and scheduling, not for communication with aircraft.
Since the start of the second Trump administration, officials have come under increasing criticism for a raft of system failures and safety violations. On Thursday, the New York Times published a long feature by James Fallows titled, “Is Air Travel Less Safe?” which asserts that “Over the past 22 months, the rate of airplane accidents and close calls has suggested a system under enormous strain.”
Controllers said that they had been given no further information about the cause. As one controller at Dallas-Fort Worth put it, “we are not aware of a reason, all we know is that it’s indefinite and US-wide,” later adding: “there is no update.”
On flight-tracking software, planes could be seen lining up to land at major airports, but none departing, with clusters of aircraft growing on the ramp and taxiways.
At 4:16 p.m. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy tweeted that
“The @FAAnews issued a nationwide ground stop for all U.S. airports following a communication issue impacting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers. FAA technicians are investigating the issue. We will provide immediate updates as we have them.”
The system-wide outage occurred one day after a slew of Microsoft services, including Outlook, Teams, Exchange Online, and Copilot, all suffered a major outage. None of these software packages are part of the system used by US air traffic control, and there was no known linkage at time of writing.
The first-ever national ground stop occurred immediately after the 9/11 attacks as a national security measure. The only other previous national ground stop was caused by technical malfunction that occurred on January 11, 2023, when an FAA system that distributes advisories to pilots crashed. That ground stop lasted 90 minutes.
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