The difficulties of American air traffic are not new, whether they concern infrastructure or the shortage of labor. Two communications outages affected flights at Newark, New Jersey, in the spring of 2025. In September 2026, hundreds of flights were canceled on the East Coast after a telecommunications line was accidentally severed.
Aircraft already in flight, more than 3,500 of them, can nevertheless land by following the planned procedures. No airport is spared, from Washington to New York and Denver. On an interactive map, American airspace empties as the hours pass.
Air traffic in the United States comes to a standstill on Friday, November 13, when the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) decides to ground all aircraft nationwide. The event begins at 3:36 p.m. New York time, or 9:36 p.m. in Paris.
The suspension, extremely rare, lasts a little under four hours and disrupts the weekend for hundreds of thousands of American and international passengers. It comes two weeks before Thanksgiving, a period of massive travel, and plunges airports into chaos and uncertainty.
The cause is communications failures at several air traffic control centers. Communications and radar function only intermittently. Air traffic controllers cannot immediately see where the aircraft are.
The decision immediately triggers the cancellation of thousands of flights, domestic and international. CNN, compiling data from FlightAware, reports more than 2,000 cancellations, including hundreds bound for Europe, and 300 announced delays, even before the start of Saturday.
Nearly 6,000 flights are also reported canceled. FlightRadar24 counts, in total, more than 10,000 flights to and from the United States canceled. The discrepancies between these tallies stem from tracking methods, but all describe a disruption of national scale.
Hundreds of thousands of passengers are affected. The BBC estimates that nearly 1.5 million people were affected by the event.
The government attributes the paralysis to updates to the air traffic control system carried out by the FAA, which is grappling with the obsolescence of equipment, some of which dates from the 1960s. According to the authorities, this communications system still uses floppy disks for crucial information.
The administration announced in early November the end of the use of these floppy disks, still crucial for processing weather data, by 2028, Reuters reports. The precise origin of Friday's outage, however, remains to be determined.
In January 2023, a computer failure had already led the administration to a comparable nationwide suspension. Lawmakers voted in July 2025 to allocate $12.5 billion to modernize the system. Friday's incident revives that investment, without removing the uncertainty over the exact cause of the failure.