The US Grounded All Departures After a Communications Failure: Over 13,000 Flights in Chaos, and the Cause Is Still Unknown

On Friday the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) halted all departures across the United States. The cause wasn't a storm, but a major failure of the telecommunications links that hit air traffic control centres across the whole country.

The measure is extremely rare. This century, US authorities have taken it only twice before: after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and after the major technical outage in January 2023. Now Friday, 13 November 2026, joins that short list.

The numbers grew by the hour. By 00:40 Central European Time more than 13,000 flights were delayed or cancelled - over 3,300 cancelled and more than 10,200 delayed. Passengers were stranded at airports, some major airports ran out of room for new planes, and the problem spilled over onto international routes, including flights between America and Europe. The only exceptions were Alaska and Hawaii, and San Francisco began releasing some flights to the Pacific again.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy confirmed that all air traffic control centres were affected. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, as well as the FBI and the NSA, say for now that there are no signs of an attack, and suspicion falls on a fault in the communications software. The FAA says it knows where every plane already in the air is and that they can continue to their destinations. Small comfort for those sitting on the ground with a cancelled flight. Even the website of the FAA command centre, through which the agency informs airlines and the public about restrictions, was down for about an hour.

Donald Trump spent Friday posting on social media about other topics and stayed silent on the crisis. Only later, speaking to Fox News, did he say that according to the information so far it wasn't a cyberattack and, like the other officials, warned that the air traffic control system is outdated. Democratic Congresswoman Nellie Pou called it "a huge, almost unprecedented disaster affecting tens of millions of Americans", ahead of the holidays. She also pointed out that just this week the Republican majority cancelled the hearing of the FAA chief.

That's the real question. If the top officials of the world's most powerful country admit themselves that they run the skies on outdated infrastructure, and the agency chief's hearing was cancelled this very week, who answers when the system goes down? And if this can happen there, how long would the systems of smaller countries hold up, including in our region?