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A nationwide ground stop halted US air travel Friday night, stranding passengers. Officials expect schedules to fully recover by the end of Sunday.
A nationwide ground stop brought US air travel to a halt on Friday night, stranding hundreds of thousands of passengers and disrupting travel worldwide. The Federal Aviation Administration lifted the ground stop on Saturday, and officials said they expect airline schedules to fully recover by the end of the day Sunday.
The Trump administration said the incident was caused by a botched replacement of old copper wire communication lines and said there was no evidence this was a cyberattack. The New York Times reported that the ground stop was prompted by efforts to replace an outdated router, which caused circuits in the national air traffic network to become overloaded and fail, interrupting communication lines between air traffic controllers and pilots.
The Federal Aviation Administration’s aging air traffic control infrastructure has had several disruptive failures in recent months. Two months ago, a circuit failure and severed fiber optic cable caused crippling ground stops and delays at airports along the East Coast. Smaller outages unfolded in October at Raleigh-Durham International Airport in North Carolina and George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, when contractors accidentally cut into fiber line.
The Friday ground stop was only the third the F.A.A. has issued this century. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy accused Congress of failing to provide funding for systemwide upgrades. Lawmakers are calling for an investigation into the incident.
The breakdown has raised questions about the country’s aging infrastructure and whether federal authorities have done enough to create backup systems to prevent disruptive or catastrophic failures.
Sources
This article was drafted with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. Company claims are reported as claims. Cover image is AI-generated.
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