Traffic stops at 9:36 p.m. French time and does not resume until 2:15 a.m. Between those two times, the airspace remains closed following a decision linked to the communications problem.
At San Francisco Airport, chaos sets in on Friday afternoon. Travelers there face the halt in flights and, as in the other terminals, try to understand when they will be able to depart again.
On Friday afternoon, the United States closes its airspace for several hours because of a major communications failure. Flights are suspended for the duration of the outage.
Nearly 6,000 trips are canceled and hundreds of thousands of passengers are affected. The suspension of U.S. air traffic thus disrupts a large share of the journeys scheduled for that day.
At airports, hundreds of thousands of passengers find themselves stranded. They seek information from airline employees while departures remain suspended.
The closure stems from a communications problem described as a major failure. This malfunction prevents traffic from continuing under normal conditions for several hours.
After 2:15 a.m., a return to normal operations remains, according to the authorities, a matter of time. Nearly 6,000 canceled trips and hundreds of thousands of passengers still affected show the scale of Friday’s failure.