US aviation regulators have lifted a nationwide ground stop on departures from all airports in the country, which was in effect for about four hours due to problems with an air traffic control communications system. This led to the cancellation and delay of thousands of flights.
Photo: Adam Gray/Getty Images
During the ground stop, 4,700 flights were canceled and another 10,000 were delayed, the BBC reports.
According to US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, American aviation authorities halted flights at all airports across the country due to "communications issues affecting all regional air traffic control centers."
According to the BBC's US partner, CBS, citing multiple sources, the suspension of departures was caused by an update to a private communications network connecting air traffic control facilities across the United States.
The operator of this system is L3Harris, CBS reports. As a result of the update, it began rebooting and then crashed.
On its website, L3Harris describes itself as an "elite provider" of communications systems for the world's most advanced airspaces, weapons systems, and command and control systems. The company did not respond to the BBC's request for comment.
According to CNN, citing data from ATC.com, air traffic control centers in at least some parts of the US completely lost the ability to communicate with aircraft.
"This is not a new 9/11"
US Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin told reporters that what happened was not linked to any attack on the United States. "It's a telecommunications outage. All planes are accounted for," he stated.
He added that "everybody is safe" and assured that the situation was not a "new 9/11."
At the same time, Mullin recalled that the last time all flights in the US were grounded was after the attacks of September 11, 2001.
The Secretary also noted that the aviation traffic incident was not related to the global outages on Microsoft servers, which had disrupted operations including the Outlook email client, the Teams video conferencing service, and the Copilot AI chatbot.
As BBC correspondents point out, Mullin acknowledged that US authorities do not yet know what exactly caused the disruptions in aviation communications. He stated that there is currently no evidence of an attack, but added that he "cannot rule anything out."
US air traffic management systems are severely outdated.
Last year, the US Congress allocated $12.5 billion for their modernization, but significantly greater investments are required for this purpose.
A few weeks ago, the FAA pledged to replace systems by the end of 2028 whose operation still relies on floppy disks—storage media that were used in the 1980s and 1990s.
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