US grounds all departing flights after links fail

Ground stop issued as communications links fail across the country

The Federal Aviation Administration stopped all departing flights across the United States on Friday afternoon US time, 13 November 2026 (Saturday morning AEDT), after a telecommunications failure knocked out communications links at every one of the country's 22 Air Route Traffic Control Centres.^[1] The FAA advisory described the order as issued "due to extraordinary circumstance and reasons for safety".^[1]

The FAA said the order concerned departures only: every aircraft already airborne had been accounted for and continued to be managed for safe arrival.^[2] Inbound international flights were to be handled case by case, the agency said.

Duffy confirms the full scale of the outage

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy confirmed the communications problem reached all 22 Air Route Traffic Control Centres, the facilities responsible for managing aircraft during the en route phase of flight between airports, and said FAA technicians had begun investigating.^[1]

The FAA described the event as a temporary telecommunications outage, though at the time of the advisory no technical fault had been identified publicly and no telecommunications provider, network equipment or software had been named.^[5]

Mullin: no threat identified, no reason to link Microsoft outage

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said officials had found no evidence of a malicious attack. "There is no indication, and we had no reason to believe as of right now that this was a threat to the United States," Mullin said.^[3]

Asked whether the outage could be connected to the Microsoft outage that began a day earlier, Mullin said: "I don't see any reason to connect those two at all." Microsoft said it had no indication the ground stop was related to its services, the ABC reported.^[3] Neither the FAA nor Homeland Security had publicly identified a root cause.

More than 14,000 flights disrupted

FlightAware data showed more than 10,000 flights delayed and 4,000 cancelled in the US by 7pm EST on Friday, NPR reported.^[4] The figures were live operational counts expected to shift as airlines updated schedules.

The FAA had given no indication of when the ground stop might be lifted, Al Jazeera reported.^[5] The precise fault, the recovery timeline and the final tally of disrupted flights were not known on Saturday afternoon AEDT.