Published Nov 14, 2026 | 12:08 PM ⚊ Updated Nov 14, 2026 | 12:12 PM
'We'll get home one day' one traveller caught in the US flight disruption was quoted as saying.
America slipped into chaos on Friday, November 13, as the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a rare nationwide ground stop order disrupting over 11,000 flights.
The disruption lasted for four hours and 21 minutes, the longest since the 9/11 Al-Qaeda attacks that claimed almost 3,000 lives. However, the US establishment ruled out a cyberattack angle and described it as a telecommunications outage brought on by ‘old equipment’.
Meanwhile, Americans struggled to keep up with the news as too many things happened at once.
As flights were grounded and thousands of passengers stranded in airports across the country, many corporate employees found themselves unable to work due to the Microsoft outage that has hit hundreds of millions of users across 74 countries.
Those heading out for a quick grocery run were stunned as Walmart and Target were also down because of an outage in the ‘Workday’ software the retailers use.
Besides, 32 people were hospitalised after a tanker struck a river cruise boat carrying 129 passengers in New Orleans due to “some type of loss of steering.”
All people ending up safe in the accident was “a miracle on the Mississippi”, according to New Orleans Mayor Helena Moreno.
The flight disruptions come three years after the 2023 FAA NOTAM outage. That led to a nationwide ground stop order on January 11, 2023 and disrupted departures for one and a half hours. Over 10,000 flight delays and cancellations followed.
Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, briefing reporters on the rare nationwide ground stop of flights issued by the FAA, stressed, “This isn’t another 9/11.”
“There’s no reason for the public to be afraid or scared for their loved ones…This is a telecommunications outage; this is much different,” Mullin added.
The FAA order was issued at around 3:54 PM EST (2:24 AM IST), citing “extraordinary circumstances” from a communication issue affecting all air traffic control centres. Over 3,500 flights were in the air when the order was issued.
“At 3:36 PM, radar and communications at air traffic centres across the country BECAME UNSTABLE. Systems weren’t fully down, but the data stopped being reliable, so the FAA grounded flights,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said.
According to the BBC, some flights were diverted to other airports, while others continued to their destinations.
Former FBI deputy director John Pistole acknowledged that “old equipment” could have played a part, but said the primary question remained “why now”.
More than 4,700 flights were cancelled, and 10,000 were delayed on Friday, while another 700 had already been cancelled for Saturday, according to FlightRadar24. The FAA opened the skies at 20:15 EST (6:45 am IST), after over four hours of uncertainty, making it the longest air traffic disruption in the US post 9/11.
Interestingly, the disruption came just a day after Duffy had formally asked Congress for $30 billion to upgrade and modernise the US Air Traffic Control System.
“Our switches, our routers actually got overloaded with data, and they went down… It’s the old hardware that went down, and I think the question for the American people is: Do you want your Congress to fund this?” Duffy asked.
Speaking at the presser, Mullin ruled out the possibility of a cyber attack.
“When we start looking at cyber threats, cyber attacks, typically some people are going to raise their hand up and say, ‘Hey, we did that.’ There’s no chatter. We haven’t seen any footprints,” he said.
However, when asked if he could say with certainty that it was not a cyber attack, Mullin said, “There is nothing certain right now. It doesn’t appear that way.”
As the authorities failed to provide a concrete explanation, many Americans and others took to social media, refusing to buy the “old equipment” theory and floated conspiracy theories.
An X user tried to connect the incident to the FAA introducing a new $875 million artificial intelligence tool into its air traffic control system earlier this week. The tool, called SMART (Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories), was made by an AI company called ASI.
But ASI was categorical in saying that “the current ground stop is not based on or a result of the SMART system, any product of ASI or our integration with FAA and ATC.”
However, that did not stop netizens from speculating whether hallucinations by the AI tool, which reportedly makes recommendations after assessing data related to weather, flight paths, traffic volumes and controller staffing, were to blame.
Others have connected the air traffic disruption to the Microsoft outage, though Homeland Security Secretary Mullin dismissed the claims. Some went a step further and found links to the recent developments unfolding in Nvidia, the chip manufacturing company at the centre of the US’s AI boom.
“You’re tellin me in 24 hrs, the Nvidia CEO steps down in a spy scandal, all of Microsoft & Outlook goes down globally, a building collapses in NYC, a Tanker sinks a River cruise ship in New Orleans and now the FAA has grounded ALL flights across the country?! WTF is going on??” a user wrote on X.
Aviation experts have warned that it would take several days for normalcy to be restored in the skies. What more theories float in the air by then remains to be seen.
For Americans, the flight disruptions came after news of the Microsoft outage, which brought several US government offices, top banks and their supermarkets to a standstill.
The collision of the cruise ship ‘American Heritage’ with a tanker on the Mississippi River, and the collapse of a three-storey building at 1321 Flatbush Avenue in New York that led to the deaths of eight people, according to Mayor Zohran Mamdani, added to their unease.
Two of the dead were children.
“A building does not simply collapse in the middle of a residential neighbourhood without warning signs or systemic failures,” Farah Louis, the local New York Council member, said on social media.
“We expect our elected officials and those who run our justice system to hold the individuals (responsible for the tragedy) accountable,” Murad Awawdeh, president and CEO of the advocacy nonprofit New York Immigration Coalition, was quoted as saying.
Also Read:
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‘I feel desperate’: Microsoft’s buyout offer and the uncertainty India’s IT workers face
(Compiled and Edited by Fayisa CA and R Rajesh Kumar.)
