Officials said they expected airline schedules to fully recover by the end of the day Sunday after a nationwide ground stop caused massive travel disruptions.
The longest flight stoppage in 25 years lasted more than four hours and ended around 5:15 p.m. Pacific time Friday, allowing some domestic flights to take off from U.S. airports.
Of the 41,000 flights scheduled Saturday, more than 6,600 were canceled, according to FlightAware. Just over 1,300 of the more than 26,000 flights scheduled for Sunday were canceled, according to Cirium, an aviation analytics firm. That amounts to about 5.2% of scheduled flights. Prior to Friday, the average cancellation rate for U.S. departures was 3.4%.
But officials said the U.S. airspace was safe and operational and would recover well ahead of the Thanksgiving travel rush.
Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin said there was no indication the failure was related to a cyberattack and no lives were at risk.
Here’s what to know:
Flights resume, but disruption continues
In New Jersey, Ashley Lynn Qua said she arrived at Newark Liberty International Airport three hours early for her Sunday flight with all her essentials in her carry-on and armed with “an extra ounce of kindness.”
“I’m not blaming anybody like the pilots, the flight attendants, the guy who’s serving me my third coffee of the morning. Those are not the people I’m upset with,” she said. “As I interact with everybody at the airport today, I know it’s not their fault.”
Qua, 32, a clean energy researcher, was on her way to a conference in Las Vegas. While her flight was expected to be on time, some of her colleagues were dealing with delays and cancellations.
Pete Alfieris, 60, was hoping to return home to Florida after attending a wedding in New York.
“Our flight has been delayed an hour or so so far, so fingers crossed that we can get out of here and go back to sun in Florida,” he said. “It’s just too cold up here.”
Alfieris, a facilities manager, said the entire travel system should be revamped.
“Honestly, it’s very perplexing,” he said. “We are in 2026, 2027. You know, we should have better infrastructure.”
System overload
The Federal Aviation Administration on Sunday described a radar site in Amarillo, Texas, and a radio communications site in El Dorado, Ark., as potential sources of the problem, which involved excess data flooding the air traffic control system and causing intermittent disruptions to communications and radar feeds.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said that after a contractor replaced old copper wire with new fiber wire at the Arkansas site and the router was turned on, a problem then cropped up in Texas, cascading into the ground stop.
“We didn’t think that should or would happen,” he told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday.
In multiple appearances on Sunday news shows, Duffy continued to press Congress for billions of dollars for upgrades to the air traffic control infrastructure.
“I can’t apologize for what was passed on to us. And I can’t blame Republicans or Democrats, because it’s all of them. It goes back 20, 25, 30 years of a lack of investment,” he told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
The air traffic control modernization began last year after Congress approved $12.5 billion of funding. Duffy and the White House are pushing for $30 billion more to complete the work. About 70% of copper wire has been switched to fiber already, officials said Saturday.
Airlines remove change fees
Airlines are obligated to offer free rebooking on another flight or a full refund if a flight is canceled.
FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said the administration was working closely with airlines and said they were waiving all terms and conditions.
Some airlines were allowing passengers to rebook if they had travel scheduled Friday or Saturday. Others extended the offer to people with reservations for Sunday or even Monday.
Microsoft outage unrelated to stoppage
Microsoft said Saturday that services were fully restored after its own massive outage last week. There was no indication the FAA ground stop was related to the service disruption that took Microsoft services offline Thursday, according to federal officials and a company spokesperson.
More than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps, Microsoft said on its website. Users reported Microsoft 365 services including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot were interrupted.
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