US flight outage live updates: FAA lifts nationwide ground stop as airport chaos continues in US and beyond | Air transport

If you’re just joining us, we’re continuing our live coverage of the major systems failure that led US aviation officials to ground flights nationwide for more than four hours on Friday. That continues to cause chaos for thousands of air travelers across the US and the world.

Here is what we know about the rare nationwide “ground stop” issued by the FAA that was in place from just before 4pm Eastern Time in the US until 8.15 pm.

• 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.