FAA Halts Flights at Every US Airport for Over 4 Hours: What Failed, What Is Still Unknown

By Thorsten Meyer | November 14, 2026 | ThorstenMeyerAI.com

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Update, November 15, 2026, 08:18 UTC: the site is reported to be in El Dorado, Arkansas. According to The Wall Street Journal, as summarized by Investing.com and the Korean broadcaster SBS, investigators traced the unusual data traffic to an FAA radio facility in El Dorado, Arkansas, where L3Harris had recently installed a new router made by Juniper Networks, and to a radar installation in Amarillo, Texas. Communications stabilized only after the devices in Arkansas and Texas were disconnected from the network, and officials disabled a router broadcasting feature that appeared to cause the excess traffic on the FAA’s approximately 60 Juniper routers, the paper reports. A spokesperson for Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which owns Juniper, told the paper that the equipment appears to have operated as intended and was not broken, according to SBS. Reuters, citing a union for FAA safety employees and other sources, reported that the problem was limited to two routers updated on November 13, according to SBS. The FAA has not confirmed the location in writing; its statement on faa.gov was unchanged when we checked at 08:18 UTC.

• Still open: investigators are examining whether the cause was faulty equipment, improper installation or incorrect configuration, according to the WSJ summary. Duffy on Saturday: “Our contractor didn’t meet the moment or the equipment didn’t meet the moment,” according to AP. L3Harris’s statement on its website was unchanged on Sunday morning; it supports the FAA’s investigation and does not address the cause.
• Routine work, not the modernization program: Bedford said replacing Cisco routers with Juniper routers is “ordinary course of business stuff” and not part of the $12.5 billion modernization effort, according to CNBC.
• Technicians’ union: the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists, which represents the FAA’s technicians, said in a Saturday statement that the FAA normally asks its own technicians in advance to assess the risks of upgrades or repairs, and that this did not happen in this case, according to AP.
• Cancellations: FlightAware counted 6,679 cancelled flights within, into or out of the United States on Saturday, and 1,237 for Sunday by 3:15 a.m. ET (all causes). With the 9,196 it counted for Friday (as of 4:11 p.m. ET on Saturday), that is more than 15,800 over Friday and Saturday.

Update, November 14, 2026, 21:18 UTC: officials now trace the outage to router work at one remote FAA site. At a news conference on Saturday morning, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said a contractor was doing “routine maintenance to switch telecommunication lines from old copper wire” to fiber at “at least one of our remote FAA locations”. The contractor is L3Harris, which, he said, owns the network the FAA uses to control the airspace, according to Fox Business. “Either through contractor error or a faulty piece of equipment, that router that was being replaced as we switched from copper to fiber, it started flooding other routers in our air traffic control system,” he said, according to MS NOW. We could not yet check Saturday’s quotes against a full transcript; they are as reported by the outlets named.

• Cause not determined: “We haven’t determined what the fault was,” Duffy said, according to Fox Business. Officials are working to determine “whether we had incompetence”, meaning an installation error by L3Harris, “or did they install a faulty router?” He said the network was hit by “over 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds”, according to Gizmodo.
• How far it spread: FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said as many as 17 of 22 air traffic control centers were affected, but none “actually went dark”, according to CNN. “If that had been a single facility, we would have just worked through it,” he said.
• Cyberattack and AI: “We see zero evidence of anything nefarious, and zero evidence of anything AI-related,” Bedford said, according to CNN.
• The contractor: in a statement on its website, L3Harris says it is “supporting the FAA in its investigation to understand the conditions that led to the Nov. 13 ground stop” and that, with its telco partners and the FAA, it has completed “more than 70% of the planned airspace communications conversion from legacy copper wires to a fiber optic system”. The statement does not address the cause.
• The AI-tool remark: on Friday afternoon, before the officials’ evening briefing, CNN aviation analyst Mary Schiavo, a former Transportation Department inspector general, said “it’s just too much of a coincidence” that the FAA was starting its new AI tool SMART when the en route system had problems, while adding: “I don’t know if they’re linked,” according to Mediaite. That is her assessment, not a finding; officials and the tool’s maker reject a link (see the section on cyberattacks and AI below).
• Still not in writing: the FAA has not published a technical account; its statement on faa.gov was unchanged when we checked at 21:17 UTC. FlightAware counted 5,341 cancelled flights within, into or out of the United States on Saturday by 4:11 p.m. ET; the count includes all causes.

At 3:54 p.m. Eastern Time on Friday, November 13, the FAA’s Air Traffic Control System Command Center sent a message US aviation has seen only once since September 11, 2001: “ALL AIRPORTS ARE GROUND STOPPED.” For a little over four hours, departures across the country were held on the ground, with few exceptions. More than 3,500 planes were still in the air, “tens of thousands of people” were stuck in airports, in the Transportation Secretary’s words, and the speculation started fast: hackers, the Microsoft outage of the day before, a new AI tool. This is what the FAA’s own records and the officials in charge say happened, what they still cannot explain, and what it means if you fly or run a business that depends on flying.

All times below are Eastern Time (ET), which in November is UTC−5, unless marked UTC.

Key takeaways

• What happened: at 3:54 p.m. ET (20:54 UTC) on Friday, November 13, the FAA Command Center ground-stopped all US airports “DUE TO EXTRAORDINARY CIRCUMSTANCES AND FOR REASONS OF SAFETY”. Its cancellation notice gives 8:16 p.m. ET (01:16 UTC on Saturday) as the end; Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the airspace reopened at 8:15 p.m. ET. Measured by the event times in the FAA’s advisories (3:53 to 8:16 p.m. ET), the stop lasted about 4 hours and 23 minutes, which BBC News calls the longest nationwide ground stop since the 9/11 attacks.
• What failed, according to officials: Duffy says that at 3:36 p.m. ET the FAA “experienced instability for our radar and our communications” at its en route centers and approach control facilities (TRACONs) across the country. In his account, old “analog telecom” switches and routers “got overloaded with data” and delivered inconsistent data. It was not a total blackout: “We didn’t lose all telecom we didn’t lose all radar.” On Saturday, Duffy traced the start to a router being replaced during copper-to-fiber work by the contractor L3Harris at a remote FAA site; whether the router was faulty or installed wrongly is not yet determined. The Wall Street Journal reports that the site is an FAA radio facility in El Dorado, Arkansas; the FAA has not confirmed this in writing (see the updates above).
• In the air: Duffy says more than 3,500 planes were airborne when the ground stop began and fewer than 400 by 8 p.m. ET. Medevac flights, life-saving cargo and law enforcement flights were allowed to keep operating.
• Cyberattack or AI? Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said officials had seen “zero evidence” of a cyberattack and that it “appears that this was mechanically driven”, but added: “we’re not going to rule that out.” Duffy and the maker of the FAA’s new AI traffic tool, SMART, both say that system was not connected to the failed equipment. On Saturday, FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said there was “zero evidence of anything AI-related”. A CNN analyst’s remark that the timing was “too much of a coincidence” is an opinion, not a finding.
• Cancellations: FlightAware counted 9,159 cancelled flights within, into or out of the United States on Friday (9,896 in all) and 3,515 more on Saturday by 7:58 a.m. ET. These counts include every cancellation of the day, not only those caused by the ground stop.
• Will it happen again? Duffy: “You will have more of these” unless Congress pays for a new system; he wants $50 billion. No written root-cause report has been published.

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What happened

The FAA Command Center’s public advisories show the trouble starting in Chicago, about half an hour before the nationwide stop. Earlier delays and ground stops that Friday afternoon cite wind, low clouds or traffic volume; the first to name equipment came at 3:21 p.m. ET, when the Command Center warned of arrival delays and airborne holding into O’Hare of up to 30 minutes “DUE TO EQUIPMENT ISSUES”. At 3:28 p.m. it stopped departures to O’Hare from across the US and from several Canadian airports, listing the cause as “EQUIPMENT / OUTAGE” with the comment “COMMS ISSUES”. Chicago Midway followed at 3:31 p.m. At 3:30 p.m., the Command Center switched on its diversion recovery tool for all airports.

Duffy dates the nationwide problem to 3:36 p.m. ET. Eighteen minutes later, at 3:54 p.m., came advisory 111, the national ground stop, with an event time starting at 3:53 p.m.: “ATTENTION ALL AIRCRAFT OPERATORS, BY ORDER OF THE FEDERAL AVIATION COMMAND CENTER ALL AIRPORTS ARE GROUND STOPPED. ALL DEPARTING TRAFFIC SHOULD REMAIN GROUND STOPPED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. INBOUND INTERNATIONAL FLIGHTS WILL BE MANAGED ON A CASE BY CASE BASIS.”

The FAA’s own statement on Friday was short: “The FAA issued a nationwide ground stop for all U.S. airports following communication issues impacting multiple Air Route Traffic Control Centers. FAA technicians are investigating the issue.” The agency marked it “preliminary and subject to change”. These centers, 21 in total according to an FAA-commissioned review from 2023 and 22 according to the FAA’s SMART announcement of November 10, largely control aircraft en route between airports.

The advisories that followed show how the system was kept running by hand:

• 4:20 p.m.: users should expect airborne holding to “ANY AND ALL AIRPORTS” because of equipment outages.
• 4:21 p.m.: flight plan drop times for all en route centers were extended to 240 minutes “DUE TO NATIONWIDE COMMS FAILURE”, which keeps filed flight plans active longer while flights wait on the ground.
• 5:46 p.m.: the stop stayed in force, reason “COMMUNICATIONS FAILURE”. “AS ENROUTE FACILITIES RECOVER, FLIGHTS WILL BE ALLOWED TO DEPART THROUGH COORDINATION WITH THE AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL SYSTEM COMMAND CENTER.”
• 7:37 p.m.: “SOME OF THE COASTAL FACILITIES HAVE BEEN ABLE TO RELEASE SOME INTERNATIONAL DEPARTURES.”
• 8:19 p.m.: “THE FAA COMMAND CENTER NATIONWIDE GROUND STOP HAS BEEN CANCELLED”, with 8:16 p.m. as the start of the cancellation.

Into the night, the Command Center kept issuing ground stops for single airports and single airlines while carriers sorted out crews and aircraft.

The stop reached far beyond the US. Eurocontrol, which manages air traffic flows for Europe, suspended all US-bound departures from its member states between 22:00 UTC on November 13 and 05:00 UTC on November 14 at the FAA’s request, according to Xinhua, which cites the agency’s notice. BBC News reports that Sydney Airport held its US-bound flights and that Air Canada cancelled flights between Canada and the US.

The longest since 9/11

Only one other nationwide ground stop has been ordered since September 11, 2001, according to NPR and ABC News: on January 11, 2023, when the FAA’s NOTAM system for safety notices to pilots failed. The Command Center’s advisories from that day give an event time from 12:20 to 14:00 UTC, about 1 hour and 40 minutes. Friday’s stop, by the same measure (20:53 to 01:16 UTC), lasted about 4 hours and 23 minutes, more than two and a half times as long. BBC News calls it “the longest nationwide ground stop of flights since the 11 September 2001 attacks”.

What officials say

The main explanation came at a White House briefing on Friday evening with Duffy and Mullin. The quotes below are from the transcript published by Roll Call Factba.se.

The cause, in Duffy’s words. “At 3:36 p.m., we experienced instability for our radar and our communications and our centers and our TRACONs across the country.” He blamed “an incredibly old air traffic control system”: “So, we have TDM telecom, so this is analog telecom. Our switches, our routers actually got overloaded with data and they went down. And — I shouldn’t say they went down; they started to give us inconsistency in the data from those routers. And because of that, we shut the system down.” Upgraded facilities, he said, were not affected: “our new IP switches did not go down; it’s the old hardware that went down.” He also said: “We use 1980s little copper lines.”

Why a ground stop, if not everything failed. “we had intermittent communication and intermittent, uh, radar,” Duffy said. “So it wasn’t a complete blackout in communication or radar.” But “when you have issues and you can’t immediately communicate and immediately see where aircraft are at, that’s a risk that we’re unwilling to tolerate.” In a post on X after the briefing, quoted by Fox Business, he wrote that exceptions were made “to allow critical medevac, life-saving cargo, and law enforcement flights to continue operating”.

How it was fixed. “We were able to deploy fixes to reduce the overloading on our switches, that we’re able to bring the networks back online and our TRACONs and our centers back online.” Duffy added that “we’re still working on the details of what went wrong today.”

A second explanation. Mullin described the cause differently: “What it appears to be right now is, as Secretary Duffy and FAA was going in and putting patches into the system, they were putting new equipment and new technology, and that new equipment, new technology just wasn’t — it was overwhelming the older system.” When a reporter asked whether FAA patching had caused the outage, Duffy answered: “this is our old, uh, TDM analog system that got overloaded with data and started to experience these issues.”

Cyberattack? AI? What officials ruled in and out

• Cyberattack: “We’ve seen zero evidence that this was — that this was a cyberattack,” Mullin said. “It appears that this was mechanically driven; however, we’re still looking, so we’re not going to rule that out.” Earlier, outside the White House, he had said “there was no indication, as of yet, that this was a nefarious act against us”, according to CBS News.
• The Microsoft outage: “I want to make sure everybody understands that there is no connection between this and Microsoft,” Mullin said. The Microsoft 365 outage is covered in our timeline of that incident.
• The FAA’s AI tool: asked whether the FAA’s new SMART system played a role, Duffy said: “But that SMART system isn’t plugged in to STARS and ERAM.” He added: “So, there was no possible way SMART would have impacted what happened today.” The vendor, Air Space Intelligence, said on social media, according to NPR: “The current ground stop is not based on or a result of the SMART system, any product of ASI or our integration with FAA and ATC.” On Saturday, FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said there was “zero evidence of anything AI-related”, according to CNN. The opposing view came before the officials’ briefing on Friday: CNN aviation analyst Mary Schiavo pointed to decades of new FAA computer systems struggling to work with older ones and called the timing “a tremendous amount of coincidence”. She added: “I don’t know if they’re linked”, and “I am guessing that once again we have a problem with new air traffic control computer systems”, according to Mediaite. The FAA had announced the expansion of SMART to all 22 centers on November 10, three days before the outage.

Will it happen again?

Asked why the FAA was not prepared, Duffy said: “So, I didn’t anticipate that we would have an outage like this.” Then: “But you will have more of these.” And: “You will have more of them unless the American people and the Congress tell us to build.” Pressed later on whether the same failure could recur, he was less categorical: “Is this exact thing going to happen again? I don’t know that this exact scenario will happen, but I did have New York a couple months ago, I had Newark a year and a half ago.”

A known weakness

The weakness Duffy describes was on record before Friday. A safety review commissioned by the FAA and submitted in November 2023 wrote that the FAA’s telecommunications backbone, FTI, “is based on time-division multiplex (TDM) technology that is no longer supported by the telephone companies’ lines on which the signals are actually carried”. Until its IP-based replacement is fully built, “individual facilities (an individual navigation aid or possibly a whole enroute center) are at risk of losing communication with the rest of the NAS due to an unplanned failure of one of the TDM-based facilities” (page 26). The FAA’s own progress tracker, Modern Skies, lists 3,508 of 5,170 telecommunications connections replaced as of October 15, 2026, or 68%.

The funding debate, in short. Duffy used much of the briefing to ask Congress for more money on top of the $12.5 billion already approved in the “One Big, Beautiful Bill”: “I’ve asked, the president has asked for $30 billion. I want $50 billion.” CNN, citing a source, reports that a letter from Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought and Duffy asking for $30 billion in additional funding went to the leaders of the Senate Appropriations Committee on Friday morning, hours before the ground stop. The Senate Commerce Committee, led by Ted Cruz, said the incident “highlights the need to prioritize modernizing ARTCCs over other projects”, according to Fox Business. House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said “American travelers deserve timely answers from the Trump Administration about how and why this happened”, according to ABC News.

What it means for travelers and businesses

If you fly:

• Expect knock-on effects. Whether a flight goes depends on crews, Duffy said: “Do we have pilots and flight attendants available to fly your flight?” And: “it’s going to take us some time to unwind what’s happened this afternoon.” He expects the system to be “back up and operational” before the Thanksgiving travel peak.
• Know your refund right. Under the US Department of Transportation’s refund rule (14 CFR Part 260), an airline must give a full refund, including taxes and fees, for a cancelled flight to, from or within the United States if you choose not to take the rebooking or a voucher. The same applies to a significant delay: three hours or more for domestic and six hours or more for international itineraries. The refund is due automatically within 7 business days for credit card purchases and 20 calendar days for other payments. The rule makes no exception for air traffic control problems.
• Do not count on meals or hotels. In the US there is no requirement for airlines to provide meal vouchers or accommodation, BBC News notes, although some offer them. Air traffic control problems are generally outside airlines’ control, so compensation rules usually do not apply; travelers flying from the UK or with a UK airline may have extra rights to care.
• Rebook in the airline’s own app or website and be wary of “rebooking” offers that reach you by text or social media.

If your business depends on flights:

• Air freight and same-day logistics stalled too. FedEx said it was “prepared to activate contingency plans to minimize service disruptions”, according to Fox Business. Time-critical shipments may have been held up as well.
• Partial migrations leave common failure points. If Duffy’s account holds, the new IP equipment kept working and the old TDM equipment failed everywhere at once. Many companies run the same mix of old and new networks. Know which critical services still depend on the old part, and test the fallback under load. Saturday’s account adds a second lesson: the router work at a small remote site was done during the day because it was not expected to affect the wider system, Duffy said, according to Yahoo News; “There’ll be a reevaluation of when we do this work.” Treat changes to shared network equipment as changes to the whole system, and schedule them accordingly.
• Fail safe, then communicate. The FAA’s response was to stop departures and land what was in the air: slow and expensive, but safe. The gap was information. Early on Friday evening, a Republican leadership aide told NBC News that senior members of Congress had not yet been briefed, and the fullest public explanation came only at the White House briefing later that night.
• Speculation is instant. Within hours, officials were answering questions about hackers, Microsoft and AI. Any organization running critical systems needs a first statement that says what is known, what is ruled out and what is not.

What is not known

• The root cause. Officials gave two accounts on Friday: Duffy blamed old TDM equipment that “got overloaded with data”; Mullin spoke of new equipment and patches “overwhelming the older system”. On Saturday, Duffy traced the start to a router being replaced during copper-to-fiber work at a remote site, but said it is not yet determined whether the router was faulty or the work was done wrongly. Officials have not named the site on the record (the Wall Street Journal reports El Dorado, Arkansas, and a second router at a radar installation in Amarillo, Texas) and have not said how this account fits Mullin’s description. On Friday, Anna Giaritelli, a national security reporter for the Washington Examiner, told CNN she had been in contact with 60 air traffic controllers and “none of them are buying what he said”. The FAA has not published a technical account; its only written statement on the incident so far says technicians “are investigating the issue” (unchanged at 21:17 UTC, November 14).
• Whether Chicago was the start. The Command Center reported equipment and communications issues at O’Hare at 3:21 and 3:28 p.m., before the 3:36 p.m. start time Duffy gave. Officials have not said whether this was the same failure. The Wall Street Journal, as summarized by Investing.com, reports that the disruption began with communications problems at the FAA’s Indianapolis center; the FAA has not published its own sequence.
• Whether a cyberattack is fully excluded. Officials say they have seen no evidence. Asked on Saturday whether a foreign nation had attacked the network, Duffy said: “the answer to that is we don’t believe so”, according to CNN. They have not formally ruled it out.
• Independent review. When we checked on Saturday morning and again at 21:17 UTC, neither the NTSB’s press releases nor the DOT Inspector General’s website mentioned the ground stop. Senator Tammy Duckworth said the cause “will warrant a thorough and complete investigation” and Senator Richard Blumenthal called for a “prompt, penetrating investigation”, according to ABC News and NPR; Senator Maria Cantwell said the Commerce Committee will review “how planes communicate through primary frequencies, backup frequencies, and other issues”.
• The full cost. Duffy said: “We haven’t done a calculation.” Bedford said on Saturday that about 12,000 flights could not be completed on Friday, according to Yahoo News. Cancellation counts will keep rising over the weekend.
• How the planes in the air were counted. The figures of more than 3,500 and fewer than 400 are Duffy’s; the FAA has not published its own count.

The bottom line

For more than four hours on Friday, the US air traffic system did what it is designed to do when it cannot trust its own data: it stopped. “Every flight has been accounted for,” the FAA said on X, according to NBC News. That is the part that worked. What did not work is a telecom backbone that an FAA-commissioned review called obsolete in 2023 and that is still only partly replaced. Whether Friday was a faulty router, a botched installation or an old network that could not absorb either is the question the FAA now has to answer in writing, with dates and evidence.

I’m Thorsten Meyer. The full sources are below, and more reality checks are at thorstenmeyerai.com.

Sources

• FAA: “FAA Statement on Nationwide Ground Stop”, faa.gov newsroom, November 13, 2026 (retrieved 12:54 UTC, November 14; unchanged at 21:17 UTC, November 14, and 08:18 UTC, November 15)
• FAA Air Traffic Control System Command Center: advisories database, fly.faa.gov, ATCSCC advisories 106 to 120 of November 13, 2026 and 001 and 005 of November 14, 2026 (UTC dates); for comparison, advisories 028 and 040 of January 11, 2023 (retrieved 12:56 to 12:59 UTC, November 14)
• Roll Call Factba.se: transcript, “Press Briefing: Markwayne Mullin & Sean Duffy Brief Discuss the FAA Ground Stop – November 13, 2026” (retrieved 12:58 UTC, November 14)
• FAA: Modern Skies progress tracker, modernskies.faa.gov, “Data current as of 10/15/2026” (retrieved 13:01 UTC, November 14)
• National Airspace System Safety Review Team: “Discussion and Recommendations To Address Risk in the National Airspace System”, submitted to the FAA, November 2023, page 26
• US Department of Transportation: 14 CFR Part 260, “Refunds for Airline Fare and Ancillary Service Fees”, via eCFR (retrieved 13:02 UTC, November 14)
• FlightAware: live cancellation statistics for Friday, November 13 (“yesterday”) and Saturday, November 14 (“today”), retrieved 7:58 a.m. ET, November 14, for Saturday again at 4:11 p.m. ET, and for Saturday (“yesterday”) and Sunday at 3:15 a.m. ET, November 15
• BBC News (via AOL): “What we know about the US ground stop and what to do if your flight is affected”, updated November 14, 2026
• NPR: “FAA lifts the nationwide ground stop for all U.S. airports”, November 13, 2026
• ABC News: “Nationwide ground stop lifted after more than 4 hours as Trump administration blames old, overloaded tech”, November 13, 2026
• CBS News: “FAA lifts nationwide ground stop that disrupted thousands of flights, White House says no indication of ‘nefarious act'”, November 13, 2026
• CNN: live coverage “Some US flights resume after hours-long ground stop”, November 13 to 14, 2026
• NBC News: live coverage “FAA lifts ground stop as U.S. airports grapple with thousands of canceled flights”, November 13, 2026
• Fox Business: “FAA lifts nationwide ground stop at airports but cancellations, delays mount”, November 13, 2026
• Xinhua: “Eurocontrol suspends U.S.-bound flight departures from member states”, November 14, 2026
• FAA: “SMART Expanding Across the Nation”, faa.gov general statements, November 10, 2026 (retrieved 21:12 UTC, November 14)
• L3Harris: “L3Harris Statement on the Nov. 13 Ground Stop”, l3harris.com newsroom, November 14, 2026 (retrieved 21:11 UTC, November 14)
• CNN: “What we know about the cause of the nationwide FAA ground stop”, November 14, 2026
• Fox Business: “Sean Duffy says L3Harris work may have caused FAA nationwide ground stop”, November 14, 2026
• MS NOW: “‘We don’t believe so’: Duffy dismisses cyberattack as cause for air traffic shutdown”, November 14, 2026
• Gizmodo: “Copper Wiring Apparently to Blame for Historic Flight Grounding”, November 14, 2026
• Yahoo News: live coverage “FAA ground stop latest updates”, November 14, 2026
• Mediaite: “CNN Aviation Analyst Says ‘It’s Just Too Much of a Coincidence’ FAA Rolled Out New AI Traffic Tool Right Before Nationwide Ground Stop”, November 13, 2026
• The Wall Street Journal: report of November 14, 2026 (US time) on the router in El Dorado, Arkansas, as summarized by Investing.com (“FAA router overload in Arkansas triggered nationwide flight grounding – WSJ”, via Yahoo, November 15, 2026) and by SBS (November 15, 2026); the WSJ article itself is paywalled and was not read
• SBS News: “Cause Revealed Behind US Airport Chaos: Not a Equipment Failure”, November 15, 2026 (including Reuters’ report on two routers)
• AP via El Dorado News: “Officials investigate L3Harris work after nationwide ground stop”, November 14, 2026
• CNBC: “‘Root cause’ of nationwide ground stop is unknown, FAA says”, November 14, 2026

Researched and drafted with AI assistance, including Anthropic’s Claude. No company, agency or lawmaker named here reviewed or sponsored this article. Our own text and graphics contain no affiliate links; offer and product boxes added by the site may contain Amazon affiliate links. This article is for information only. It is not legal advice; check your airline’s terms and the DOT rules for your own case. Statements as published by the FAA and L3Harris and as made at the White House briefing, and as reported by the outlets above, as of 13:35 UTC on November 14, 2026, updated at 21:18 UTC the same day with Saturday’s news conference as reported by the outlets above, and at 08:18 UTC on November 15 with reporting on the router sites; the FAA’s written statement was unchanged at both times; the FAA has said its information is preliminary. Images: AI-generated illustration (Runware) and graphics by Thorsten Meyer AI; our own images show no real people or logos. Boxes added by the site may show product photos or people.