The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has issued a nationwide ground stop, which is pretty unprecedented. Admittedly we’ve had our fair share of air traffic control issues in the United States over the years. But this is really on a different level, perhaps unlike anything we’ve seen since 9/11, in terms of operational disruptions.
Flights grounded “due to extraordinary circumstances”
At 3:54PM ET today (Friday, November 13, 2026), the FAA issued a ground stop for flights across the country, as pilots received the following message:
DUE TO EXTRAORDINARY CIRCUMSTANCES AND FOR REASONS OF SAFETY. ATTENTION ALL AIRCRAFT OPERATORS, BY ORDER OF THE FEDERAL AVIATION COMMAND CENTER ALL AIRPORTS ARE GROUND STOPPED. ALL DEPARTING TRAFFIC SHOULD REMAIN GROUND STOPPED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. INBOUND INTERNATIONAL FLIGHTS WILL BE MANAGED ON A CASE BY CASE BASIS.
As usual, JonNYC was among the first to break the news, and he even reported on this before the official ground stop was issued, when airports in the Northeast started having issues, before this spread nationwide.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy confirmed this development a while later, sharing that there were “communication issues impacting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers,” and he stated that “FAA technicians are investigating the issue.”
As of now, there’s no timeline for this ground stop ending, so it’s going to be a very rough night for air travel, and for that matter, likely a very rough weekend.
Was this just a tech glitch, is there a cyber attack, or what?
So, what could explain an outage of this scale? Well, it remains to be seen if this is related, but the FAA reportedly began its rollout of the new AI-powered air traffic management tool this week, known as SMART (which stands for “Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories”).
Timing-wise, it would make sense there’s a connection, but you also wouldn’t assume that this impacts the basic communication that air traffic control has.
Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin insists that there are no indications of this being a cyber attack.
I don’t want to be a conspiracy theorist, but it sure feels to me like some very strange things are going on. We just saw a huge Microsoft outage, and it has been a very strange week in general. Is that
Note: This is a breaking new story which will be updated shortly with more details…
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