Old tech blamed for the ground stop that caused flight chaos: 'It got overloaded'

Flight are listed on a board inside a terminal at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport on Friday.(Lindsey Wasson / AP)Updated November 13, 2026 at 10:10 PM EST The nationwide ground stop that paralyzed the U.S. aviation system on Friday has ended, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

The Details

The rare stop, which lasted about four hours, grounded thousands of flights at all U.S. airports in one of the biggest disruptions of the nation's air travel system since the September 11th attacks.

In a Friday night news conference, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said that air traffic control facilities had experienced "intermittent" outages of their radar and communications systems beginning earlier in the afternoon. Duffy blamed outdated technology for the failures.

"We have old switches, old routers. We use 1980s little copper lines. It's an old system that went down and went down everywhere. It got overloaded," he said.

But when pressed by reporters on exactly why those systems wou