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The Federal Aviation Administration halted departures from every US airport for more than four hours on Friday, November 13, after a telecommunications failure disrupted the air route traffic control centers that manage high-altitude traffic. The ground stop began at 3:54 p.m. Eastern and was lifted at 8:15 p.m., Al Jazeera reported.
Flight tracker FlightAware listed more than 10,000 delays and over 4,000 cancellations by the end of Friday, according to CBS News. About 3,100 aircraft were already in the air and bound for US airports when the order went out. Data firm Cirium counted about 11,000 flights, carrying more than 1.5 million passengers, still scheduled to leave after 4 p.m.
Officials gave overlapping accounts of the cause. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said switches and routers became overloaded with data and went down, and blamed an aging air traffic control system. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said new security patches added to the older system appeared to overwhelm its routers. Multiple sources told CBS News that an update to the FAA Telecommunications Infrastructure network, which L3Harris operates, caused the system to reboot and then crash. L3Harris did not respond to requests for comment.
Mullin said there was no cyberattack, no sign of a deliberate act and no danger to the public at any point. He also said there was "no connection" between the outage and a Microsoft outage earlier in the week. Duffy said there was no total loss of communications or radar during the stop.
Recovery is expected to take days. Flightradar24 counted about 700 flights already canceled for Saturday, and airlines spent Friday night repositioning crews and aircraft. Duffy said he expected normal operations before the Thanksgiving travel period begins later this month, and renewed his request for $50 billion from Congress to overhaul air traffic control technology.
The last nationwide halt of departures came in January 2023. Duffy and Mullin did not say what first set off the failure, and the FAA said its technicians were still investigating.
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