FAA ground stop halts flights nationwide; travelers face weekend of delays and cancellations

The nationwide ground stop is over, but the disruption is far from it. Here at Metro Airport, flights resumed after the Federal Aviation Administration halted departures across the country for more than four hours. The FAA says a telecommunications outage raised safety concerns, triggering the nationwide ground stop.

The order came down Friday, just before 4 p.m., setting off thousands of cancellations and leaving travelers scrambling to get where they needed to go.

Rick Reyor was in Michigan for work. His flight home to Austin was supposed to leave Saturday morning, but he's faced one cancellation after another.

"Four Each time I've been on flight and one of the legs of the flight's been cancelled for whatever reason, so then the whole thing's been cancelled," Reyor said.

When I asked him what questions were going through his mind, he pointed to the uncertainty of it all.

"One, will I get home today? That's the number one thing, but why is it happening and will it happen again?" Reyor said.

The FAA says a telecommunications outage triggered the nationwide ground stop. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy pointed to aging infrastructure.

"What we have is an incredibly old air traffic control system. Our switches, our routers, actually got overloaded with data and they went down. And I shouldn't say they went down. They started to give us inconsistency in the data," Duffy said.

While the ground stop was lifted at about 8:15 p.m. Eastern, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin stated the public was never in danger and that there was no evidence of a cyberattack or nefarious activity.

"Future aviation outages and ground stops could happen again without major federal funding to overhaul outdated, overloaded air traffic control systems," Mullin said.

To put this into perspective, it was only the second nationwide grounding of departing flights since 9/11. The other came in 2023, when an FAA system that sends critical safety notices to pilots failed.

For Reyor, the disruption has reached well beyond a single missed flight.

"I mean, quite a bit. maybe 30 weeks of the year. I think when it's something, it's communications thing where you're kind of in the dark about what it actually is. That's when you kind of get nervous and stressed. And so not on my stress, but I miss a whole day of work again. So it's a big deal," Reyor said.

And planes moving again doesn't mean every passenger is suddenly where they need to be. For Bria, getting to Houston wasn't just about getting home she was traveling to be a maid of honor at her mom's wedding.

"I learned right after I got off work. So I was going to Houston. My mom's getting married tomorrow. So I was going to Houston for that. And my coworkers all knew. And as soon as I left work and was driving, they all started calling and texting me like, have you seen the news? But I still headed here towards the airport, just having hope that something was going to happen. And so she's just telling me not to worry. And of course, I'm telling her not to worry. So I think we're just at this point, just praying that I can get there in time," Bria said.

Federal officials are warning that the ripple effects could be felt throughout the weekend with delays and cancellations as airlines try to work through that backlog. So if you are flying this weekend, make sure you check in with your airline for the flight status before you head to the airport.

This story was reported on-air by a journalist and has been converted to this platform with the assistance of AI. Our editorial team verifies all reporting on all platforms for fairness and accuracy.