Legacy tech issue led to FAA’s nationwide ground stop
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The ground stop delayed more than 10,000 flights Friday, though officials said there was no indication of a cyber-attack or relation to the Microsoft outage earlier in the week.
The Federal Aviation Administration issued a nationwide ground stop for more than five hours across all U.S. airports Friday, citing “extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety,” impacting at least 10,000 flights and disrupting air travel for more than 2 million passengers.
The ground stop was lifted around 9 p.m. EST, after which Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy blamed the ground stop on outdated legacy IT systems in a briefing at the White House.
“This is a legacy system problem that took place tonight, and we have to handle it accordingly,” said Duffy, who himself was on a flight back to Washington, D.C. from Dallas after speaking with college students at Texas Christian University when the FAA began experiencing instabilities in radar and communications.
“Our switches, our routers, actually got overloaded with data, and they went down,” Duffy explained. “And I shouldn't say they went down. They started to give us inconsistency in the data from those routers. And because of that, we shut the system down.” Mullin said the ground stop was issued “out of an abundance of caution,” and said no flights or lives were at risk.
Mullin said the National Security Agency, Defense Department, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, FEMA and other agencies worked together Friday to investigate and address the issues. He said “it does not appear” the issues leading to the ground stop were caused by a cyberattack, and said there was no evidence or “footprints” of anyone improperly accessing or hacking FAA systems. “However, we’re still looking, so we’re not going to rule that out,” he said, after unequivocally stating that the FAA’s issues were not related to recent global Microsoft outages.
Duffy said FAA would prioritize larger flights into the weekend and expected delays to compound for several days, but anticipated flight schedules to get back on track before the Thanksgiving rush.
During the press briefing, he called on Congress to pass an emergency funding bill that would give the Transportation Department another $50 billion to modernize the nation’s air traffic control system. In 2025, Congress appropriated $12.5 billion through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to begin that modernization effort , but Duffy said it isn’t enough. He added that new artificial intelligence-powered systems rolled out in recent weeks had nothing to do with the ground stop, and said systems recently upgraded from analog to digital “did not experience these issues.”
"It's important that we're able to finish this work with additional resources,” Duffy said. “I got 12 and a half billion, and with that money, we are spending it and spending it well, but the Congress at the time knew that that was not going to be enough,” Duffy said. I think there's no better time than the present to actually give us the money and let us finish the bill. What went down was old, right? It was … old legacy equipment. It failed, and listen, it's going to continue to fail.”