A US nationwide ground stop ended around 8:15 p.m. ET, and the FAA said airplane departures could still be delayed late Friday evening Eastern time.
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The US Federal Aviation Administration said the nationwide ground stop ended around 8:15 p.m. ET, but it warned that getting air traffic back to normal will be slow. Officials said departures could be delayed late Friday evening Eastern time, and passengers should contact their airlines for information about their flights.
The disruption’s ripple effect was expected to last for days. FlightAware reported more than 2,500 flights were canceled in the US on Saturday and hundreds more were delayed.
International flights were being handled on a case-by-case basis, according to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin. San Francisco airport said that flights headed across the Pacific Ocean were cleared to leave the airport from Friday evening, including flights destined for Hawaii and Asia.
Europe’s aviation agency suspended US-bound departures at the request of the FAA from 5 p.m. Eastern on Friday until midnight. Airlines are obligated to offer free rebooking on another flight for travellers who want to continue, or a refund if a flight was canceled and they decide not to take the trip.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the normalization process won’t be quick and suggested more disruptions might occur, saying, “We didn’t think we would have this kind of outage. We did.” Officials said the grounding began after new technology being hooked up to the nation’s air traffic control system overloaded antiquated equipment, causing “intermittent” communications and radar gaps, which led to a flight shutdown of more than four hours.
Duffy noted the modernization began last year after Congress approved $12.5 billion in funding, and he and the White House are pushing for $30 billion more to complete the work.
Officials also said they saw no link between the ground stop and a Microsoft service disruption earlier this week. Microsoft said it had no indication the ground stop was related to the outage that took Outlook and other services offline Thursday, and Mullin said there is no indication the failure was related to a cyberattack, adding, “There was never any lives at risk. There was no flights at risk. FAA was able to handle it. We did it.” The grounding was enacted “out of an abundance of caution,” Mullin said.
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