Sean Duffy, Trump’s transportation secretary, acknowledges tech failure led federal aviation officials to shut down system and ground flights, though details are scarce
US aviation agency lifts nationwide ground stop affecting all air travel
Chaos at US airports as flight stoppage grinds travel plans to a halt
Ben Doherty, a Guardian Australia reporter, is currently on a plane at Sydney airport, waiting to fly to the US. He writes:
US-bound flights out of Sydney in Australia have been held on the tarmac, some for up to three hours. Flights are being gradually cleared for departure after being held in Australia by the FAA out of concern planes would not be able to land once they reached the US.
Outages in communication, radio frequencies and radar began in Chicago, according to the Air Current, an aviation news site.
There is, as of now, no clear explanation of what, exactly, caused the “telecommunications outage” that forced the sudden halt to all departures at US airports.
According to the tracing site FlightAware, 8,553 flights were delayed on Friday, and there were 6,816 cancelled flights.
While Donald Trump was uncharacteristically silent throughout the crisis, his secretaries of transportation and homeland security, Sean Duffy and Markwayne Mullin, appeared to suggest that the cause of the outage was that older technology became overwhelmed with data after new technology was introduced by the FAA.
Mullin, a former Oklahoma senator now leading the US Department of Homeland Security, said “we’ve seen zero evidence that this was a cyber-attack.”
This is just the second nationwide ground stop of all departures since the 9/11 attacks. The previous one came in January 2023, when the FAA paused all domestic departures for less than two hours.
As disruptions ripple through the global aviation system, we will continue to track the impact of the outage, and look for answers as to what, exactly, went wrong.
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