On Friday, 13 November 2026, the Federal Aviation Administration grounded all departing flights across the United States for roughly four hours, one of only two nationwide ground stops since the September 11 attacks. The shutdown began after the FAA's air traffic control system suffered a communications failure. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told reporters at the White House that the trouble started at 3:36 p.m. ET, when controllers at the country's 22 regional air traffic control centers began receiving inconsistent data from their radar and communications systems. "They started to give us inconsistency in the data from those routers, and because of that we shut the system down," Duffy said. By the time the ground stop was lifted around 8:15 p.m. ET, more than 3,500 aircraft were airborne and roughly 1.5 million passengers were facing disruption across the national network. Flightradar24 data showed about 3,100 aircraft still bound for U.S. airports during the halt.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said there was no indication the outage was a "nefarious attack" and no prior sign of a cyberattack. "The public was never at danger through this process," he said. The incident happened days after the FAA announced the national expansion of SMART, a new airspace planning tool developed by contractor AirSpace Intelligence. The FAA had said three days earlier that SMART would cover airspace managed by all 22 regional control centers, the last remaining site without the system.
The national rollout of SMART had been underway for months. The system was designed to replace the aging NextGen architecture with a cloud-based framework that lets controllers and pilots share real-time data about traffic, weather, and flight plans. Before the ground stop, the system had been deployed at all but the 22 regional centers in the continental United States.
AirSpace Intel, the company behind SMART, issued a statement on X saying the ground stop was not based on or a result of the SMART system or its integration with the FAA and air traffic control. Aviation analysts said the four-hour grounding could disrupt airline schedules for days. The only other nationwide ground stop since 9/11 came in January 2023, when the FAA halted domestic departures for about 9 hours amid a similar computer outage.
Companies operating within the national airspace said the disruption cascaded quickly. Regional airlines reported delayed or canceled schedules as crews and aircraft repositioned. Some major carriers issued advisories to passengers urging them to check with reservation systems for updates as the morning duties played out.
Senators Richard Blumenthal and Maria Cantwell pressed the FAA for answers, with Blumenthal calling for a "prompt, penetrating investigation" into the causes of the shutdown. White House officials characterized the failure as a systems-level breakdown rather than an outside attack, while lawmakers on both sides of the aisle demanded a full accounting of what went wrong and how the agency plans to harden its network against future failures.
The FAA said it was working with its contractors to restore full service and pledged to provide a detailed report to Congress. The agency also said it would review whether the outage exposed gaps in its contingency planning for regional air traffic control centers.
For now, the skies over the United States are open again, but the incident has underscored the fragility of the digital infrastructure on which modern air travel depends. As the FAA works to restore full service, the national aviation community is left to wait for the full accounting of what happened on a Friday afternoon in November. The incident will likely prompt renewed scrutiny of the FAA's modernization timeline, with lawmakers asking whether the agency's dependency on a single contractor's software created a single point of failure.