Sean Duffy, Trump’s transportation secretary, acknowledges tech failure led federal aviation officials to shut down system and ground flights, though details are scarce
US aviation agency lifts nationwide ground stop affecting all air travel
Chaos at US airports as flight stoppage grinds travel plans to a halt
Ben Doherty, a Guardian Australia reporter, is currently on a plane at Sydney airport, waiting to fly to the US. He writes:
US-bound flights out of Sydney in Australia have been held on the tarmac, some for up to three hours. Flights are being gradually cleared for departure after being held in Australia by the FAA out of concern planes would not be able to land once they reached the US.
Our flight has had to take on extra fuel after running the air-conditioning (needed for a plane full of people) for several hours while waiting for clearance.
It’s 13 hours from Sydney to LAX. We’ve been on board for three hours so far, haven’t yet moved, but about to taxi shortly.
It’s not been too bad. We’ve been kept informed by the captain, but the messages have reflected the uncertainty over this incident.
We were delayed, and then boarding was brought forward, reinstated at the original time. We were granted clearance to leave, but then this was rescinded. Even from a distance of 12,000 kilometres, the impacts of this are being felt.
If you’re just joining us, we’re continuing our live coverage of the major systems failure that led US aviation officials to ground flights nationwide for more than four hours on Friday. That continues to cause chaos for thousands of air travelers across the US and the world.
Here is what we know about the rare nationwide “ground stop” issued by the FAA that was in place from just before 4pm Eastern Time in the US until 8.15 pm.
Outages in communication, radio frequencies and radar began in Chicago, according to the Air Current, an aviation news site.
There is, as of now, no clear explanation of what, exactly, caused the “telecommunications outage” that forced the sudden halt to all departures at US airports.
According to the tracing site FlightAware, 8,553 flights were delayed on Friday, and there were 6,816 cancelled flights.
While Donald Trump was uncharacteristically silent throughout the crisis, his secretaries of transportation and homeland security, Sean Duffy and Markwayne Mullin, appeared to suggest that the cause of the outage was that older technology became overwhelmed with data after new technology was introduced by the FAA.
Mullin, a former Oklahoma senator now leading the US Department of Homeland Security, said “we’ve seen zero evidence that this was a cyber-attack.”
This is just the second nationwide ground stop of all departures since the 9/11 attacks. The previous one came in January 2023, when the FAA paused all domestic departures for less than two hours.
As disruptions ripple through the global aviation system, we will continue to track the impact of the outage, and look for answers as to what, exactly, went wrong.
