FAA resumes flights after a five-hour stop and the government blames overloaded routers

The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Friday, November 13 lifted the order that halted all departures nationwide, after about five hours, according to CBS News. “At 8:15 tonight, Eastern time, we've opened up the airspace,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said at a news conference; it was 2:15 on Saturday in mainland Spain. The FAA said on X that before clearing flights it tested its systems to confirm they were stable, according to NBC News.

Duffy attributed the stop to an “incredibly old” air traffic control system whose routers became overloaded with data and began giving inconsistent information, so the system was shut down, according to CBS News. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said the new patches and equipment being installed in the old system appeared to have overwhelmed it, and repeated that there was no cyberattack and no link to the Microsoft outage, according to CBS News and NBC News.

Several sources told CBS News that an update to the private communications network connecting air traffic control, operated by L3Harris, caused the system to reboot, crash and lose communications. L3Harris did not immediately respond to CBS News.

FlightAware listed more than 10,000 delays and more than 4,000 cancellations on Friday, according to CBS News. Duffy warned that recovery will be slow because aircraft and crews must be repositioned, and Delta, United, Southwest and American announced a gradual restart with further delays and cancellations expected on Saturday, according to NBC News.

The FAA has not yet published a report on the technical cause. The account of the network update comes from unnamed sources cited by CBS News.