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On Friday, the FAA stopped every airline departure in the US for more than four hours, the longest nationwide ground stop since 9/11. On Saturday, officials said it started with one router.
Should one router be able to ground a whole country?
- The stop: issued Friday afternoon, lifted at 8:15 pm ET. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said about 3,500 planes were in the air when it began, and fewer than 400 by the evening briefing. Flights already in the air were still handled; medical flights kept flying.
- The cause, as officials described it on Saturday: contractor L3Harris was switching telecom lines from copper wire to fiber at a remote FAA site. Duffy said a router involved in that work "started flooding other routers in our air traffic control system", disrupting radar and radio contact with planes.
- Finding it took about 45 minutes, partly because maintenance on the network is logged on paper, said FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford. All facilities rely on one network: "There's no backup to the backup."
- The fallout: Bedford said about 12,000 flights couldn't be completed. Thousands more were cancelled on Saturday. The flight app Flighty said the outage has caused more cancellations than the 2024 CrowdStrike software failure.
- Still open: officials don't yet know whether the router was faulty or was installed or configured wrongly. L3Harris says it is "supporting the FAA in its investigation". The FAA says there's "zero evidence of anything nefarious and zero evidence of anything AI related", and it has disabled the problem feature on about 60 routers of the same type.
- Bedford's warning: "Let's not kid ourselves; it will continue to break until we replace it."
Sources:
- Yahoo News, FAA ground stop live updates (Saturday news conference, L3Harris statement): https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/live/faa-ground-stop-latest-updates-duffy-blames-contractor-l3harris-thousands-more-flights-canceled-saturday-no-sign-of-cyberattack-161329174.html
- CNN, US flight ground stop latest: https://www.cnn.com/2026/11/14/us/live-news/us-ground-stop-flights
- NBC News: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/faa-orders-nationwide-ground-stop-departing-flights-reasons-safety-rcna609247
- The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/news/1033489/faa-ground-stop
- TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2026/11/13/u-s-government-grounds-all-flights-across-the-united-states-due-to-extraordinary-cirumstances/
- Yahoo News, FAA lifts nationwide ground stop: https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/faa-lifts-nationwide-ground-stop-020705860.html
Pictures:
- Flight map replay and chart: our screen recording of grounds.top, an independent, unofficial map of community ADS-B flight data (adsb.fi), shown for news reporting.
- Air traffic control rooms (Washington and Anchorage Air Route Traffic Control Centers, and an FAA en-route center) and Bryan Bedford's official portrait: FAA / U.S. government, public domain (file photos, not the site involved).
- Fiber network work: USDA / Lance Cheung, public domain (file photo, not the FAA site).
- FAA seal: U.S. Government, public domain.
Music: Hypnothis by Kevin MacLeod, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hypnothis_(ISRC_USUAN1100634).mp3)
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What the video says
On Friday, the FAA stopped every airline departure in America for over four hours. Officials say one router started it. About thirty-five hundred planes were airborne. By evening, under four hundred. The longest nationwide stop since nine eleven. Officials say contractor L3Harris was swapping copper lines for fiber at a remote site, on a Friday afternoon. A router in that work flooded the network, disrupting radar and radio contact with planes. Finding it took about forty-five minutes, partly because maintenance is logged on paper. Every facility relies on that one network. The FAA's chief: there's no backup to the backup. He says about twelve thousand flights couldn't be completed. Flighty counts more cancellations than the CrowdStrike meltdown. Faulty router, or a bad install? Officials don't know yet. L3Harris says it's supporting the investigation. No hack and no AI, the FAA says. But its chief warns the network will keep breaking until it's replaced. So should one router be able to ground a whole country?