The Federal Aviation Administration lifted its nationwide ground stop on Friday evening, November 13, after hours of communications trouble. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy put the reopening at 8:15 p.m. Eastern. The command center issued its cancellation advisory four minutes later, formally ending the national restriction.
The FAA subsequently said some departures were resuming and that it had tested its systems thoroughly for stability before clearing flights. That statement established a return to departures, while leaving each airline to determine which flights it could operate and how to recover its schedule.
Duffy blamed an overload of old telecommunications switches and routers, the equipment that moves information through the network. He said it began producing inconsistent data and that newer switches had stayed up. He also excluded SMART, the FAA’s newer traffic-planning tool, saying it was disconnected from the affected equipment. That was his account of the failure, not a completed technical report identifying its initiating fault.
Problems had begun at 3:36 p.m. Eastern, according to Duffy’s published timeline. More than 3,500 aircraft were airborne when the FAA imposed the stop. Controllers and pilots followed procedures to bring them in safely. Duffy said radar and telecommunications had not been lost completely and that exceptions allowed critical medical, life-saving cargo and law-enforcement flights to continue.
The command center had already described a conditional restart before canceling the national order. Advisories 119 and 120, issued at 5:46 p.m. Eastern, allowed coordinated departures as facilities recovered. San Francisco International Airport later announced clearance for Pacific-bound routes, including Hawaii and Asia. Those limited releases preceded the nationwide cancellation.
FAA ground-stop procedures explain that progression. Aircraft held under an order need approval from its originating authority before release. National cancellation requires a command-center advisory identifying released airports or facilities. Recovering facilities can therefore support approved traffic before the overall restriction is removed.
The disruption had already reached thousands of flights. Reuters later reported more than 6,600 cancellations and 8,600 delays, citing Flightradar24. Its report supplied no precise counting cutoff or breakdown isolating cancellations caused by the outage. Those figures describe the reported travel disruption, rather than a final audited total of damage from one technical failure.
An aircraft held on one flight can reach its next departure late, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics explains. That creates a practical problem even after controllers authorize movement: the aircraft may still be at another airport. CNBC also reported that prolonged stops can push crews against daily working limits. A usable communications network does not by itself resolve those aircraft and crew constraints.
The FAA’s 9:24 p.m. Eastern operations plan recorded several additional ground stops requested by airlines and kept coordination hotlines open overnight. Some local restrictions were subsequently canceled. The national stop’s removal should therefore be read alongside airline notices, rather than treated as confirmation that every scheduled flight survived the interruption.
For Saturday travelers, the next scheduled FAA system-status update was 6 a.m. Eastern, or 1100 UTC. Passengers should check each flight and connection with their airline before accepting an alternative itinerary. The overnight plan also identified possible later delay programs, making Saturday’s recovery a separate operational task from Friday’s decision to reopen departures.
