The FAA lifted a nationwide ground stop Friday evening after aging infrastructure forced the agency to halt outbound flights for hours, leaving passengers stranded at airports across the US.
The Federal Aviation Administration canceled the ground stop at 8:15 p.m. ET Friday, but delays are expected to extend into the weekend, with plans to prioritize aircraft that have more passengers on board.
Airline stocks fell right in post-market trading on Friday after the FAA ordered the nationwide ground stop. Departing flights could not take off, while flights already in the air continued to their destination.
At a press conference following the lift, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said aging infrastructure led to the ground stop.
“Our switches, our routers, actually got overloaded with data, and they went down…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,” he said.
He added that there needs to be a complete overhaul of the system, including investing in new towers and airports, which he estimates will cost about $50 billion.
Shares of American Airlines (AAL), Southwest (LUV), JetBlue (JBLU), Delta Air Lines (DAL), and United Airlines (UAL) all moved lower on the news. The economic impact of the outage is unknown.
Around 5 p.m. Eastern, the FAA said in a statement on X that there was “a temporary telecommunications outage” and, “out of an abundance of caution,” all flights had been halted. At the time, there were roughly 3,500 planes in the air, but more than 10,000 flights were disrupted.
This nationwide grounding was extremely rare. The last time that the FAA halted all US departures was in January of 2023 due to a system outage. Prior to that, traffic was halted after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Meanwhile, Microsoft said in a statement posted on X that the nationwide FAA ground stop was not related to any of its services. The tech giant apologized earlier on Friday for a software outage that left users unable to access Outlook email and other services, as the company worked to resolve the issues from Thursday into Friday.
Source: finance.yahoo.com
