A major telecommunications outage forced the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to issue a rare nationwide ground stop on Friday evening, November 13, 2026. Although the shutdown was lifted after roughly four and a half hours, more than 13,000 flights were delayed or cancelled, causing widespread travel disruption across North America and Europe.
The FAA halted all departing commercial flights across the United States at 3:54 PM ET (8:54 PM GMT) due to “extraordinary circumstances”. Flights already in the air were permitted to continue to their destinations, while military, medical, and law enforcement flights remained airborne.
The ground stop remained in place until approximately 8:30 PM ET (1:30 AM GMT on Saturday). It marked the longest nationwide grounding of US air traffic since September 11, 2001.
US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy stated that communications switches and routers became overloaded with data and went down. This caused communications towers to broadcast inconsistent data and prevented air traffic safety notices from being published.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin confirmed the disruption was strictly a technical telecommunications failure. Officials emphasized there was no indication of a cyberattack or terror threat.
Secretary Mullin said that new technology was being added, and it overloaded the TDMA legacy equipment. Which (Sec. Duffy said) caused instability
According to data cited by The Wall Street Journal, over 13,000 flights were delayed or cancelled during the evening. Tracking service FlightAware recorded more than 10,300 delays and nearly 1,500 outright cancellations by late Friday.
Airlines across Europe,including Aer Lingus, as well as carriers in England, France, and Germany,temporarily suspended US-bound departures. Major Canadian airports in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver also experienced significant delays and suspensions.
Aviation officials warn it will take several days for airlines to clear the backlog, as thousands of aircraft and flight crews are out of position for their scheduled weekend routes.
Dublin airport cancellations:
- Inbound Washington EI116@0505
- Inbound Chicago EI424@09.30
Sean Duffy shared: “What we have is an incredibly old air traffic control system… So we have TDM telecom. So this is analogue telecom. Our routers actually got overloaded with data and they started to give us inconsistent data and because of that, we shut the system down.”
