FAA Ground Stop Followed Communication Issues

The Federal Aviation Administration issued a nationwide ground stop for all US airports on 13 November 2026 after communication problems at multiple Air Route Traffic Control Centers. In a statement marked as preliminary and subject to change, the agency said: “The FAA issued a nationwide ground stop for all U.S. airports following communication issues impacting multiple Air Route Traffic Control Centers. FAA technicians are investigating the issue.” The written statement gives no start time, no end time and no cause beyond those communication issues.

The same evening, the Department of Homeland Security published a readout of a White House briefing by Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. The department said the briefing followed “a temporary telecommunications outage.” Mullin is quoted as saying: “We have seen zero evidence that this is a cyberattack or an SI attack. This is a national security risk because our air traffic control system is outdated and it hasn’t been a priority from Congress.” In the same release he says the president “has declared this a national emergency.”

What the official statements say, and what they leave to the briefing

The FAA’s page remains a short operational notice. It does not say when departures were allowed to resume, and it does not describe switches, routers or any software tool. Those details, where they appear, come from the briefing, according to press accounts, not from the agency’s written statement.

GeekWire, in an article updated on the evening of 13 November, attributed the reopening of US airspace to Duffy, at 17:15 Pacific Time (01:15 GMT on 14 November), more than four hours after the problems began. The same report said Duffy told the briefing that the FAA first saw unstable radar and communications data at 12:36 Pacific Time (20:36 GMT on 13 November), that ageing switches and routers in the agency’s telecoms network “got overloaded with data,” that newer IP switches “did not go down,” and that “It’s the old hardware that went down.” It also quoted him saying the FAA still relies on “1980s little copper lines,” and that the agency restored service after deploying fixes to reduce the overload. GeekWire quoted him ruling out the FAA’s SMART traffic-planning tool: “There was no possible way SMART would have impacted what happened today.” Those cause and timing claims are Duffy’s, according to that press account. They are not in the FAA statement.

GeekWire added that the FAA had said on Tuesday, 10 November, that it was expanding SMART to the airspace managed by all 22 of its en-route centres, and that Mullin, earlier on the Friday, had said officials were looking into a possible link, including through CISA. By the evening briefing, according to the same article, Duffy said the tool “isn’t connected to the core systems controllers use to track flights.” The official DHS readout does not mention SMART. GeekWire also wrote that Mullin said the overload “appeared to have been triggered by new equipment the FAA was installing,” which was “overwhelming the older system,” without either official naming that equipment.

The briefing also, according to GeekWire, had Mullin saying there was “no connection between this and Microsoft,” after a separate Microsoft 365 disruption the day before. That Microsoft denial is not in the DHS written readout either. Mullin’s official line on the cause remains the one in the department release: no evidence of a cyberattack, and an outdated air traffic control system that he says Congress has not treated as a priority.

The DHS release does, however, give more of Mullin’s operational account than the FAA page. He said the department had brought “all of our assets, be it from DOW, to CISA, to all of our NOCs, and all the other components we have inside of DHS” into the response, and that “NSA is working with us.” He also said: “No one was in danger because of procedures we put in place. The system went down, we reacted the way that we were trained to react, and everybody came together.” Those are official quotes. They still leave the technical failure itself to the preliminary FAA notice and to the secretaries’ briefing remarks, as the press recorded them.

GeekWire also placed the outage in a longer modernisation programme, writing that the FAA is replacing its legacy telecoms network with an internet-protocol network, that AT&T took over the lead role on that work in August with an initial $74.3 million award, and that the agency is working toward finishing by the end of 2028. That programme is useful context for why Mullin and Duffy talked about outdated equipment. It is not, on its own, an official finding that a particular cutover or contract caused Friday’s stop. As of the FAA’s still-preliminary statement, the written record stops at communication issues at multiple en-route centres, an investigation by FAA technicians, and a promise of updates.

A ground stop is a blunt tool, and the official paper trail is still thin

A nationwide halt on departures is a rare step. It is also a blunt one: aircraft already in the air keep flying under the procedures then in force, while everything waiting to leave is held. Mullin, in the DHS release, said nobody was in danger “because of procedures we put in place,” and that “the system went down, we reacted the way that we were trained to react.” The FAA statement does not repeat that reassurance, and it still warns that the information is preliminary.

That gap matters for anyone trying to read a policy argument into a technical failure. Mullin used the briefing to press Congress to fund a modernised system, and to say the president had declared a national emergency. Those are official’s words, not a technical report on which box failed. Duffy’s account of overloaded legacy equipment, and his denial that SMART was involved, sit in the same category until the FAA publishes a cause of its own. The FAA’s E-IDS rollout, which TSN has already covered as a display-system modernisation at a handful of sites, is a reminder that the agency is replacing pieces of an old stack in stages. It is not evidence that E-IDS, or any other named programme, was involved on 13 November.

The same caution applies when this event is set beside other FAA operational stories TSN has covered, from a shore-to-offshore drone approval to SpaceX’s request for priority in a much busier launch schedule. Those are decisions about how the agency manages crowded airspace. Friday’s stop was a loss of ordinary communications, described officially only as an issue at multiple en-route centres, and described in the briefing, via the press, as a temporary telecommunications outage.

The next document that would settle the argument is an FAA update that is no longer labelled preliminary: when the stop was lifted, what failed, and whether the overloaded-legacy-equipment account is the agency’s own finding or only the secretary’s explanation at the podium.