Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin tried to calm a jittery nation Friday after the Federal Aviation Administration suddenly grounded departing flights at every airport in the country. He said there was no sign the shutdown came from an attack.
The FAA issued the rare nationwide ground stop Friday afternoon “due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety.” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the problem was a communication issue affecting all of the FAA’s Air Route Traffic Control Centers. Those centers handle high-altitude traffic between airports. Duffy said FAA technicians were investigating.
Speaking to reporters outside the White House, Mullin called the stoppage “unprecedented” but said it appeared to be a technical failure.
“There was no prior indication, there was no indication as of yet that this was a nefarious attack against us — it’s just a telecommunication outage as of right now,” Mullin said.
“This isn’t another 9/11. I cannot repeat that enough,” he added.
Mullin said President Trump had been briefed and that officials were “not ruling out anything at this point” as they try to pin down the cause. He said flights already in the air would be handled “case-by-case” and urged families not to panic.
“There is no reason to be concerned about your loved ones if they’re flying in or anything like that,” Mullin said. He cautioned that getting planes moving again would take some time.
Mullin also said the outage was not connected to the massive global Microsoft outage the day before. He said officials were looking into whether a new AI-supported air traffic tool the FAA has been rolling out played any role. It was not clear whether there was any link.
Bloomberg later reported, citing a source, that the FBI is investigating whether a software update caused the outage. The source said the FBI does not believe a cyberattack or criminal activity was behind it.
Shortly before the nationwide order, both of Chicago’s major airports, O’Hare and Midway, were put under a ground stop because of an equipment outage.
Nationwide ground stops are extremely rare. The FAA halted all flights after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and Friday’s order is only the second since then. The last one came in January 2023, when the FAA’s Notice to Air Missions system failed and pilots could not get their required pre-flight safety notices. More than 1,300 flights were canceled that day.
Aviation experts noted that pilots are trained to fly through communications outages and that backup systems exist for these situations. Air traffic communications run on several layers, from high-altitude centers to local towers. Friday’s outage hit the high-altitude centers.
The outage comes as the White House pushes Congress to approve a $30 billion plan to “modernize America’s aging aviation system.” Administration officials have long warned that the country’s outdated air traffic control infrastructure is due for a major upgrade.
For millions of travelers stuck at airports Friday, those warnings hit home.
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