More Than 2,500 US Flights Canceled For Saturday After Air Traffic Control System Failure
Reform.news Editorial Team · 14 November 2026, 10:45
https://reform.news/en/more-than-2-500-us-flights-canceled-for-saturday-after-air-traffic-control-system-failure/More than 2,500 flights in the United States were canceled for Saturday, November 14, following a failure in the air traffic control system that had forced departures nationwide to be suspended for several hours the previous day. Several hundred more flights were delayed, the Associated Press reports, citing FlightAware.
US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said at a White House briefing that the failure occurred after outdated equipment became overloaded. According to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, the overload followed the installation of updates and the introduction of new technologies, Nextgov reports.
According to official excerpts from the briefing published by the US Department of Transportation, radar and communications disruptions began on November 13 at 3:36 p.m. US Eastern Time (9:36 p.m. in Warsaw). More than 3,500 aircraft were in the air when departures were suspended. Duffy said communications and radar continued to experience intermittent disruptions, while air traffic controllers and pilots followed established procedures for such situations.
“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,” Duffy said.
Duffy added that new switches, which had already replaced some of the old equipment, continued to operate. He also said that the FAA’s new SMART air traffic management tool was not connected to the failure and urged Congress to allocate additional funding to modernize the system.
Mullin said authorities had found no evidence of a cyberattack as of the briefing. The investigation into the cause of the failure was ongoing.
The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) lifted the nationwide ground stop at 8:15 p.m. US Eastern Time (2:15 a.m. Saturday in Warsaw). An overnight operational notice from the FAA said restrictions remained in place for some airlines at several airports at the carriers’ own request.
Duffy warned that the resumption of flights also depended on crew availability. According to the Associated Press, the disruption could continue to affect flight schedules for several more days.