FAA grounds all flights nationwide: What does it mean?

The Federal Aviation Administration ordered a nationwide ground stop Friday, halting every departing flight across the United States after a widespread equipment and communications failure knocked out key systems used to manage high-altitude air traffic.

What We Know: The FAA Command Center issued the order Friday, November 13, citing what it called “extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety.” The full text of the order read: “ATTENTION ALL AIRCRAFT OPERATORS, BY ORDER OF THE FEDERAL AVIATION COMMAND CENTER ALL AIRPORTS ARE GROUND STOPPED. ALL DEPARTING TRAFFIC SHOULD REMAIN GROUND STOPPED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. INBOUND INTERNATIONAL FLIGHTS WILL BE MANAGED ON A CASE BY CASE BASIS.”

No domestic departures were permitted to leave their origin airports while the order remained in effect. Flights arriving from international destinations were being handled individually.

Confirmed Information: The disruption stemmed from what the FAA described as frequency outages affecting Air Route Traffic Control Centers — the facilities responsible for managing aircraft flying at high altitudes. Some accounts characterized the problem as a rolling frequency outage, suggesting the failures were spreading or shifting across the network rather than striking all centers simultaneously. The FAA said it was working to resolve the communications and equipment issues, though as of the latest reports, no official timeline for a full restoration of normal flight operations had been announced.

The scale of the disruption places it in rare company. The last comparable nationwide ground stop occurred on September 11, 2001. A more recent nationwide halt, in January 2023, was triggered by a failure of the FAA’s Notice to Air Missions system — a separate piece of infrastructure from the communications equipment affected Friday.

Travelers should expect significant delays and cancellations, with ripple effects likely to continue even after the ground stop is lifted. The FAA and airlines advised passengers to check directly with their carriers for current flight status.

Separately, a Nor’easter bringing strong winds and rain prompted a weather-related ground stop at LaGuardia Airport and other airports in the New York metropolitan area Friday. That action was unrelated to the nationwide technological failure.

Unconfirmed Information: An air traffic controller at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport described the situation as a “nationwide outage” and indicated the ground stop was expected to last until 5 p.m. EST. That timeline had not been confirmed by the FAA as of publication.

Speculation: The information in this section is unconfirmed community speculation, not established fact. These claims are included because they are circulating publicly around the developing story. They have not been confirmed by authorities or independently verified by this newsroom.

The nature and severity of the outage prompted widespread public speculation about its cause, with some suggesting the failure could be the result of a cyberattack or other deliberate interference with FAA systems. The FAA had not characterized the outage as anything other than an equipment and communications failure, and no evidence reviewed by this newsroom supported claims of malicious activity.