US airspace has reopened following a nationwide air traffic control outage.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy says air traffic systems are operating again, but airlines face days of disruption as flight movements recover.
Authorities lifted the US ground stop at 8:15pm Eastern time after an outage disrupted air traffic control systems nationwide. However, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy warned that flight delays could continue for several days.
Speaking at a White House briefing, Duffy said control centres and terminal approach facilities were operating again. But flight movements would depend on available resources as officials worked to clear the disruption.
He said the outage would have ripple effects, with officials reviewing weekend flights to help restore normal operations. Meanwhile, authorities were prioritising larger aircraft over smaller movements to get more traffic moving.
Equipment failure triggered US ground stop
Duffy said the incident began at 3:36pm local time, when radar, communications and control centres experienced instability nationwide. The Federal Aviation Administration then ordered a nationwide halt to departures after routers began supplying inconsistent data.
He attributed the failure to ageing equipment and said a patchwork fix had overwhelmed existing systems. Routers became overloaded with data, which in turn affected the consistency of information reaching air traffic controllers.
However, Duffy said recently installed equipment had not caused the outage. Technical teams reduced the load on network switches, allowing the networks to come back online.
He also said the response to those fixes pointed towards equipment and network failures rather than an attack. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said officials had found no evidence of a cyberattack.
Mullin rejected claims linking the incident to a Microsoft outage the previous day. He also said the public had never been at risk and that the administration was helping stranded passengers.
Recovery efforts ahead of Thanksgiving travel
Duffy said restoring full capacity would take time, although he expected operations to recover before the busiest Thanksgiving travel days. The holiday travel period begins in less than two weeks and typically brings heavy demand for US flights.
Meanwhile, the transportation secretary renewed his appeal for Congress to provide $50 billion for a new air traffic control system. He described the current network as extremely old and urged lawmakers to fund its replacement.
For now, officials are working to restore flight movements while managing the backlog from the afternoon shutdown. Duffy cautioned that reopening the airspace would not immediately return operations to normal.
