On the night before Saturday, November 14, all departures from US airports were suspended for approximately four hours. At 8:15 p.m. Eastern Time, 3:15 a.m. Bulgarian time, the restriction was lifted.
Nearly 7,500 flights did not operate. Thousands more were rescheduled.
The reason: telecommunications problems
Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy appeared together before the media at the White House. "Everything we know makes it clear that this was not a cyberattack," Mullin stressed.
The cause was more likely a telecommunications disruption. "We have an incredibly outdated air traffic control system. The routers were overloaded. Data discrepancies emerged. For that reason, we shut down the system," Duffy stressed.
He has long been demanding more funding from Congress for modernisation: at least 30 billion dollars. Only last year did Congress allocate 12.5 billion dollars to the Department of Transportation for the modernisation of the national air traffic control infrastructure.
It is unclear when traffic will return to normal
It is unclear when air traffic will return to normal completely. Duffy expects it to take some time. It is hoped that flights will increase again on Saturday.
Until then, thousands of passengers will remain stranded at airports. But most of them are taking the situation calmly. "What can you do? If you get angry, you lose," said one passenger who had planned to fly to Toronto, Canada, but was stranded at the airport in Chicago.
The third nationwide flight shutdown in the US
Discussion about the consequences will gather pace in the coming days. This is only the third nationwide grounding of flights in the US.
The last similar case was in 2023. At that time, one of the computer systems had suffered a failure. The first nationwide flight shutdown was imposed following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.