The Federal Aviation Administration lifted a nationwide ground stop at 8:15 p.m. Eastern on Friday, reopening U.S. airspace after a telecommunications outage disrupted flights across the country. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced the restart during a Friday night news briefing.
"At 8:15 tonight, Eastern time, we've opened up the airspace," Duffy said. He cautioned that the system would not return to normal immediately, telling viewers that recovery would take time. "Now does that mean every flight is going to fly right now? It's going to be slow," he said.
The FAA attributed the disruption to a "telecommunication outage," the failure of a communications link the agency relies on to coordinate traffic. The ground stop held aircraft on the ground nationwide rather than allow departures into a system the agency could not fully manage.
The order hit passengers at every major U.S. hub during one of the busiest travel windows of the week. Friday evening departures carry a heavy share of business and weekend traffic, and a halt ordered just before the 8 p.m. hour stranded travelers at gates from coast to coast.
Friday's stop is the second nationwide aviation disruption in roughly two years. In January 2023, a failure in the Notice to Air Missions system, which distributes safety alerts to pilots, forced the FAA to halt all domestic departures for about 90 minutes. That outage delayed or canceled more than 10,000 flights and prompted the agency to accelerate modernization of the aging system.
Airlines now face the task of rebuilding schedules from a standing start. Aircraft parked at outlying gates must be repositioned, crews must be tracked against duty-time limits, and passengers rebooked onto flights that were already near capacity. Those ripple effects typically outlast the ground stop itself by a day or more.
Duffy's briefing offered no timeline for when the communications system would be fully restored, and no cause for the outage was given Friday night.
