US lifts nationwide ground stop for airports hours after halting all departures
5 hours ago
The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) canceled a ground stop on all national flights hours after stopping departures at US airports on Friday.
"We have old switches, old routers, we use 1980s old copper lines. We use an old system," US Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said. "It was a legacy network problem."
Even with the order being lifted, airlines will not be able to immediately return to normal operations as many of their planes and crews are out of position.
"It's going to be slow," Duffy told reporters at the White House.
Officials said they think the system will be back to normal in time for Thanksgiving on November 26, one of the busiest times to travel in the US.
It was the first nationwide ground stop since January 2023, when the FAA dealt with a system outage. Prior to that, the last ground stop was after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks .
US Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said there was no indication the communications breakdown resulted from a cyberattack or artificial intelligence and that the public was never in danger.
Over 4,500 flights were canceled Friday and about 700 for Saturday and over 10,000 flights within, into, or out of the United States were delayed, according to the FlightAware aviation tracker.
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