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Last UpdateNovember 14, 2026, 12:41 PM EST

Hundreds of thousands of travelers remain stranded at airports all over the country after more than 10,000 flights were canceled across Friday and Saturday — a massive disruption that affected more than 1.5 million scheduled passengers after 4 p.m. ET Friday alone.

WHAT TO KNOW

• The FAA issued a rare nationwide ground stopfor all U.S. airports Friday afternoon following major telecommunication issues impacting multiple air route traffic control centers.
• After more than four hours, the FAA lifted all restrictions and flights resumed, but major delays continue to impact travelers.
• Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin attributed the incident to the FAA’s aging infrastructure, with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy calling on Congress to provide $50 billion in emergency funding for modernization efforts.

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Duffy says contractor error or faulty router may be behind nationwide FAA ground stop

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy speaks during a press briefing at the Department of Transportation headquarters building in Washington, DC, on Nov. 14, 2026. (Credit: Aaron Schwartz / AFP via Getty Images)

In a press briefing Saturday morning, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said air traffic control communications are back to “full operations,” while offering his fullest explanation yet of what caused the nationwide FAA ground stop on Friday.

Duffy said a contractor with L3Harris was performing routine maintenance at a remote FAA location to switch decades-old copper telecommunications lines over to fiber.

“What we’re working to determine was whether we had incompetence, meaning was it user error…from L3 Harris, or did they install a faulty router?” Duffy said.

The replacement router began flooding other routers across the air traffic control network with thousands of connection attempts, overwhelming the system.

Duffy said this interfered with air traffic controllers’ ability to communicate with airplanes and disrupted radar feeds.

FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said officials isolated the defective piece of equipment responsible for the outage. It took roughly 45 minutes from the start of the disruptions to pinpoint the cause, which officials said has now been resolved.

“What we had were random reports from different facilities of certain frequencies that were going in and out, and requiring them to switch between primaries and backup switching,” Bedford said. “Now, if that had been a single facility, we would have just worked through it. But when we saw it go to two, three, ten, 17 facilities, that’s when we started to realize there was something much larger going on here.”

“Since we couldn’t explain it quickly, that’s when we went to the national ground stop,” Bedford added.

Bedford also repeatedly told reporters that no systems “went dark” or were “fully lost” on Friday.

There was no evidence of a cyber attack and “zero evidence of anything AI related,” Bedford said, adding that FAA’s safety system are “operating as safe today as it was two weeks ago.”

Posted by James Cirrone

FAA expects there will be about 5,000 flight cancellations, anticipates ‘full recovery’ by Sunday

FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said he expects there to be as many as 5,000 flights canceled out of the 41,000 that are scheduled on Saturday.

As of 1 p.m. ET Saturday, just over 5,000 U.S. flights have been canceled and more than 14,600 have been delayed, according to flight-tracking platform FlightAware.

“That will set us up for full recovery tomorrow. And based on everything that we’re hearing from our airline partners, they believe that they’ll be able to have full schedule integrity by the close of business on Sunday,” Bedford said. “I do think the worst is behind us, but we still do have a significant amount of recovery work to do.”

Posted by James CirroneShare

Congress must act to upgrade aging FAA telecommunications system, Duffy says

Colorful autumn leaves are seen on the U.S. Capitol grounds at dusk on Nov. 2, 2026 in Washington, D.C. (Credit: Kevin Carter/Getty Images)

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy reiterated his demand Saturday that Congress allocate more funds to upgrading the decades-old FAA telecommunications infrastructure, known as the FTI system.

The FTI system, which is managed by L3Harris, connects air traffic control facilities across the U.S. and suffered a major outage on Friday, which was what prompted the FAA to issue a nationwide ground stop.

“Every agency within the government for better than two decades has flagged this FTI system as a critical weakness. So, this is probably one of the worst kept secrets in government that this FTI system needs to be replaced,” FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford told reporters.

In order to prevent further malfunctions, Duffy said he has asked Congress to provide $30 billion toward the modernization of air travel, including new telecom architecture, new software, upgraded runways, and new control towers to replace 50- to 75-year-old ones.

But to cover all airspace infrastructure needs, Duffy has said the full bill would cost some $50 billion. Duffy said he’d send a full, detailed funding request to Congress by Monday.

Posted by James CirroneShare

Flying after the FAA ground stop? What passengers need to know as disruptions linger

Travel plans were ruined for hundreds of thousands of airline passengers following a nationwide FAA ground stop, which caused more than 15,000 flights to be canceled or delayed across Friday and Saturday.

People preparing to travel in the wake of this monumental event should be aware of a few key issues.

Delays

“You will continue to see some delays and cancellations as carriers reschedule flights and reposition aircraft/crews where they are needed most,” Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said in a post on X this weekend.

Travelers should continue to check their flight status directly with their airline for real-time updates, he noted.

General scheduling issues

“There are going to be planes that didn’t take off, which means the aircraft aren’t where they’re supposed to be for the next flight,” Gary Leff, a Texas-based travel industry expert, told Fox News Digital.

This means that “the crews are going to be out of position too.”

Leff added, “And when planes and crews are not where they’re supposed to be, there are downline effects for all the flights that are supposed to be operated by those people.”

Refunds and rebooking travel

The five biggest domestic airlines have shared guidelines for travelers looking for refunds or to rebook their trip after the ground stop.

Know your rights

Transportation Department rules say that passengers with canceled flights are entitled to a full refund if they choose not to accept a voucher or other compensation from their airline.

For those who checked bags during their travels, there are guidelines set in place to ensure passengers are reunited with lost or delayed luggage.

“If an airline unreasonably refuses to consider a bag lost after it has been missing for an unreasonable period of time, the airline could be subject to enforcement action by the DOT,” the U.S. Department of Transportation website states.

Customers are entitled to a refund if they paid a baggage fee and their bag has been lost or significantly delayed, according to the website.

Click here to read the full story by Fox News Digital’s Sadie Chafe and Jessica Mekles.

Posted by Alexandra KochShar

FAA official says federal government was caught off guard by air traffic communication disruption

FAA Acting CTO Rebecca Guy speaks during a press briefing at the Department of Transportation headquarters building in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 14, 2026. (Aaron Schwartz / AFP via Getty Images)

A federal official revealed Saturday that the FAA was not aware that a malfunction like the one dealt to air traffic control communications on Friday could be so widespread.

In response to a reporter’s question about whether the FAA had ever conceived of a meltdown of this magnitude, FAA Acting CTO Rebecca Guy said, “We did not.”

“And that is exactly why we want to continue to verify and do analysis as we go forward,” Guy said.

Posted by James CirroneShare

Trump delivers blunt message in calls with Duffy amid FAA ground stop: ‘Do it fast. Do it right’

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy speaks alongside FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford during a press briefing at the Department of Transportation headquarters building in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 14, 2026. (Credit: Aaron Schwartz / AFP via Getty Images)

President Donald Trump called Sean Duffy amid Friday’s air traffic control chaos and told him to “do it fast” and “do it right,” the transportation secretary told reporters on Saturday.

“In my phone calls with him, he said, ‘I want you to know that I will commit every resource of the federal government, whatever you need. I am willing to give those resources to the FAA to make sure you guys can do this. Do it fast. Do it right,’” Duffy said.

FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford also said this situation prompted Trump to activate the White House Situation Room, where national security officials were assembled to assess what was going on.

Duffy said FBI Director Kash Patel was present, as was Jay Clayton, the director of national intelligence.

Officials initially worried the air traffic communications meltdown might have been triggered by a foreign adversary, Duffy said, adding officials now “feel very comfortable” the root cause was not a foreign actor.

Instead, Duffy and Bedford attributed the outage to a faulty piece of equipment, noting investigators are still working to determine how the malfunction cascaded across well over a dozen FAA facilities.

Posted by James Cirrone