The DHS secretary said it didn’t appear to be a cyberattack.
ByAyesha Ali,Sam Sweeney,Ivan Pereira,Emily Chang,Clara McMichael, andJack Moore
November 14, 2026, 12:00 AM
The Federal A all airports after more than four hours Friday — a move that thrust the nation’s air travel into chaos with thousands of canceled flights and stranded travelers
At a White House press briefing Friday night, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy blamed old technology that became overloaded for “instability” and “inconsistency” in radar and communications affecting the air traffic control system.
He called on Congress to provide billions more in funding to modernize critical equipment, calling the situation an “emergency.”
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FAA ground stop live updates
Pressed by reporters whether the outage was the result of a cyberattack, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said there was nothing to indicate that so far. “There’s nothing completely certain right now,” he said, adding, “It doesn’t appear that way.”
In the hours after the FAA ordered the ground stop, thousands of flights were canceled, and officials warned it would take time for airports to return to normal.
“It’s going to take us some time to unwind what’s happened this afternoon,” Duffy said adding that “hopefully tomorrow we are going to start to see far better movement.”
Duffy said he believes things will be “back up and operational” heading into Thanksgiving travel.
What happened?
Shortly after 3:30 p.m. ET Friday, the FAA began experiencing “instability for our radar and communications” involving Air Traffic Control Centers and Terminal Radar Approach Control facilities, Duffy said.
The FAA issued the ground stop at 3:54 p.m., pausing all departures across the country. There were 3,500 planes in the air at the time, Duffy said.
The FAA’s alert said the stop was “due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety.”
It was only the second time since 9/11 a nationwide ground stop was ordered. The last timewas in 2023, when the FAA NOTAM system went down and pilots could not get their pre-departure paperwork.
The ground stop was lifted at 8:15 p.m. ET
At the White House press briefing, Duffy blamed “an incredibly old air traffic control system” run on what he called “analog telecom.”
“Our switches, our routers, actually got overloaded with data … and started to give us inconsistency in the data from those routers. And because of that, we shut the system down,” he said.
Press for funding
While at the podium, Duffy spent a majority of his time calling on Congress to appropriate funding to help modernize the aging air traffic control system in the US.
He pressed lawmakers for billions in funding for what he called a “complete overhaul” of the air traffic control system.
Duffy insisted that the U.S. has the “safest airspace in the world” but also suggested an incident like Friday’s ground stop would happen again and that flying will continue being “less safe” unless Congress provides funding for flight system advancement.
“We didn’t think we would have this kind of outage,” Duffy said. “The systems that were deployed kept everybody safe — everyone landed. We’re able to review what went wrong and then reboot the system and go. But you will have more of these. You will have more of them unless the American people and the Congress tell us to build.”
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In earlier remarks to reporters shortly after the FAA ordered the ground stop, Mullin told reporters that the federal government was looking into all possibilities behind the communications issue. When asked by a reporter if it could be a cyber attack, he said they were not ruling anything out.
“As we investigate what caused this, you always got to assume that, as many cyber attacks that take place, that you make that assumption,” Mullin said. “But as of right now, that’s not known.”
AirSpace Intel, the contractor behind the SMART AI system that has been rolling out at facilities nation wide said in a statement on X that “The current ground stop is not based on or a result of the SMART system, any product of ASI or our integration with FAA and ATC.”
Mullin said “we’re looking at that” when he was asked if there was a link between the rollout and the ground stop.
At the White House press briefing late Friday night, Duffy said it was “old legacy equipment” that failed.
“So there was no possible way SMART would have impacted what happened today,” Duffy said.
Congressional response
Several congressional leaders spoke out about the incident on Friday evening, calling for answers and accountability.
House Democratic leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries called the outage an “unprecedented breakdown.”
“American travelers deserve timely answers from the Trump Administration about how and why this happened and assurances that steps are being taken to ensure that our air travel system remains safe and functional,” he said in a statement.
Sen. Tammy Duckworth, an Illinois Democrat, noted in an X post that the “safety of our skies is built on redundancies.”
“Whatever led to the nationwide ground stop will warrant a thorough and complete investigation,” she wrote. “As Afrom the FAA.”
Senate Transportation Committee Ranking Member Maria Cantwell said in a statement that her team is in contact with the FAA about the ground stoppage.
“Technology issues related to how planes communicate through primary frequencies, backup frequencies, and other issues will be something the Commerce Committee will be reviewing,” the Washington Democrat said.
Related Topics
- FAA
- Airlines
