US grounds all flights after communications outage

The authorities in the United States on Friday grounded all flights across the country as a precautionary measure following a major communications outage.

The Federal Aviation Administration said there had been a “temporary telecommunications outage” and all flights had been halted out of an “abundance of caution”.

Every flight had been accounted for and the movement of international flights was being handled on a case by case basis, the authority said. Departing flights had been hampered more.

The cancellations and delays caused by the grounding led to tens of thousands of passengers being stranded at airports.

While the ground stop orders were lifted about four hours later, the disruption continued.

This was the second time since the terror attacks on September 11, 2001, that flights on this scale had been grounded.

US Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin said there were no indications that the outage was the result or a “nefarious attack” or a cyberattack, AP reported. “This isn’t another 9/11,” AFP quoted Mullin as saying.

US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said that “old hardware” was responsible for the disruption.

Scale of disruption

Nearly 5,000 flights had been cancelled, ABC News reported. Several flights had been diverted.

The airports in Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, Charlotte and Miami were the worst affected, data from FlightRadar24 showed.

At some of these airports, more than 20% of the flights had been cancelled and over 50% delayed. In some cases, the delay was by more than three hours.

Flights to and from Canada and Mexico were also hampered.

As of 7 am Indian time on Saturday, several flights were airborne in the US airspace, data from FlightRadar24 showed.

Officials said that the disruption was not linked to the global Microsoft outage reported a day earlier.

In January 2023, there was a brief nationwide halt in flights when a pilot notification system failed.

This is a developing story. It will be updated as new details become available.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.