The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has issued a nationwide ground stop for all flights that are due to take off in the US on Friday, delaying or canceling nearly 7,000 US flights, according to aviation tracker FlightAware.
In a post on X, the US transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, said the stoppage is due to “a communication issue impacting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers” and that the FAA’s technicians are looking into the matter.
This is the third time all departing flights have been grounded in the US. The first time was on 11 September 2001; the other was in January 2023, when the FAA paused all domestic departures for less than two hours after a pilot notification system malfunctioned.
The FAA has more than 14,000 air traffic controllers who handle the more than 44,000 flights that take off from airports across the US each day, according to FAA data.
