The FAA nationwide ground stop of 13 November 2026 explained: what happened, the timeline and the cause

On the afternoon of Friday 13 November 2026, US time, the Federal Aviation Administration told every airport in the country to stop sending planes into the air. The order came from the FAA's Air Traffic Control System Command Center in Virginia, which manages the flow of traffic across the whole national airspace. Its advisory said all airports were ground stopped, all departing traffic should stay on the ground until further notice, and inbound international flights would be handled case by case.

The FAA's short public statement says the stop followed communication issues affecting multiple Air Route Traffic Control Centers, and that its technicians were investigating. An Air Route Traffic Control Center, often just called a center, is a large facility whose controllers look after planes during the long middle part of a flight, between the airports. The FAA's advisories that afternoon list 20 of them.

The stop was cancelled at 01:16 UTC on 14 November, which was 8:16 pm Eastern time on Friday evening and 6:46 am on Saturday in India. Delays and cancellations carried on through the night, because aircraft and crews were now in the wrong places.

A ground stop is an order that keeps flights on the ground at their departure airports. The FAA's own glossary says ground stops are most often used when the traffic heading to an airport is expected to be more than the airport can accept for a short time, or to pause traffic while a longer plan is put in place. During a ground stop, flights going to the affected place are held where they are.

Most ground stops are small. On the same afternoon, before the national stop, there was an ordinary one at Las Vegas, for wind. A ground delay program is the longer version: instead of stopping flights, it gives each one an expected departure clearance time, a slot, so they leave in a controlled trickle.

A nationwide ground stop is rare because it stops departures to every destination at once. It does not bring planes down. Aircraft already in the air keep flying to their destinations. What it does is stop adding new planes to a system the controllers can no longer fully trust.

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The FAA has said only that there were communication issues at several centers, and its advisories call it a communications failure. It has not published a technical cause. Air traffic control depends on a private network that carries radar data, flight plans and the voice links between controllers and between facilities. If centers cannot reliably pass flight plans and hand planes over to each other, they cannot safely accept new departures.

At a briefing that night, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy blamed old equipment and said routers had been overloaded with data, according to CBS News. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said there was no indication of a cyberattack. CBS News also reported, citing unnamed sources, that an update to the network that connects air traffic control facilities caused a reboot and a crash. The FAA has not confirmed that account, so treat it as a lead, not a finding.

The pattern in the advisories fits a communications problem rather than, say, a radar failure: the first symptom was an equipment outage in Chicago, flight plan handling at the centers needed special measures within half an hour, and recovery came center by center. When the FAA publishes a root cause, we will update this page.

The FAA's statement is marked preliminary. Expect a fuller account of the cause, and questions from Congress about the state of the air traffic control network and the work under way to replace older equipment. If you were flying, check your airline's app rather than the FAA, because airlines rebuild their own schedules after a stop like this.

For engineers, the useful thing to watch is the root cause. A shared network that many independent facilities depend on is the kind of single point of failure every large system has somewhere, and how the FAA explains it will be worth reading.

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