FAA lifts ground stop after four-hour takeoff freeze

Nationwide takeoff freeze begins

The FAA issued a national ground stop at three forty-four PM ET on Friday due to extraordinary circumstances and safety reasons, halting takeoffs across US airports.

Ground stop lifted after four hours

Officials announced the ground stop was lifted at eight fifteen PM ET and flights would resume, though many face overloaded airports and crew time limits.

Aging system blamed for outage

Transportation Secretary Ryan Duffy said TRACONs in air traffic control centers experienced inconsistency in radar data and airplane communications from analog telecom devices that got overloaded.

System patches triggered the failure

CBS News reported that an update to the air traffic control system's private communications network operated by L3Harris caused a system reboot and outage. Duffy confirmed patches sparked the issue.

“By doing nothing, you inject way more risk into the system… I didn't anticipate that we would have an outage like this.”

Massive disruption to flight operations

FlightAware listed nine thousand one hundred twenty-four US flights as delayed and five thousand nine hundred one flights canceled as of eight thirty-nine PM ET.

No cyberattack or security threat found

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said there is no reason to suspect a cyberattack, national security threat, or connection to the recent Microsoft Outlook outage.

Outage spread from Chicago control center

The outage began at the Chicago air traffic control center, then spread to Boston, Washington, New York, and Minneapolis, disrupting both radar and radio frequencies used by controllers and pilots.