Updated Nov. 14, 2026, 1:33 p.m. ET
Flight cancellations and delays will continue nationwide after federal officials blamed “routine upgrade” work for a massive ground stop that snarled air traffic across the country.
More than 8,000 flights into or out of the United States have already been delayed or canceled on Nov. 14, according to flight tracking website FlightAware. Major hubs including Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, Chicago O’Hare International Airport, John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport were among the hardest hit.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said at a Nov. 14 press conference the travel woes began when a contractor at one of the Federal Aviation Administration’s remote locations was replacing aging copper wire with fiber. A router that was installed starting flooding others on the air traffic control system causing communication issues and disruption in radar feeds, he said. Officials were able to isolate the network, take the router offline and then restart the system.
“We are back at full operations,” Duffy said.
Bryan Bedford, administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, estimated up to 5,000 of the 41,000 scheduled flights for Nov. 14 will be canceled as airlines work to reposition crews, pilots and flight attendants. Still, Bedford said “the worst is behind us.”
“We will still have delays and cancellations today, but that will set us up for full recovery tomorrow,” Bedford said. “Based on everything that we’re hearing from our airline partners, they believe that they’ll be able to have full schedule integrity by the close of business on Sunday.”
Federal officials are still working to determine exactly what happened and what went wrong during the upgrade work that’s part of a decades-long project. They did not disclose the location where the incident took place that caused the ground stop. USA TODAY has reached out to both the FAA and the contractor L3Harris, for more information.
The FAA issued the ground stop soon after 3:36 p.m. ET on Nov. 13, which halted flights around the country, forced passengers to remain stranded or find alternate transportation and left airlines with thousands of disrupted flights to reschedule. The ground stop, which came just weeks before the busy Thanksgiving travel season, was lifted at 8:15 p.m. Friday evening.
20,000 flights disrupted by ground stop
More than 3,500 airplanes were flying when the ground stop was issued and all landed safely, according to Duffy. Bedford said that over 20,000 flights were scheduled during the course of the ground stop and about 12,000 of those flights, which included a mix of private jet, general aviation and commercial trips, “were lost,” he said.
No facilities “went dark” and no communication was fully lost, he said, but officials made the call to issue the ground stop after seeing “instabilities” at 17 of 22 en route facilities that they initially couldn’t explain.
“When we get to a root cause analysis, whatever we do learn from that of course we will pivot in terms of how we do future sustainment,” he said.
Officials are still working to determine whether the problem was due to an “incompetence” in the installation or faulty equipment, Duffy said. One day after Duffy asked Congress to approve $50 billion to upgrade the system, increasing an earlier request from President Donald Trump, the transportation secretary reiterated that call for increased funding.
“We will work with the greatest telecom companies in the world, which will be AT&T, Verizon and Lumen,” he said. “They’re all working with us on the new architecture, but in the meantime, until I can build that I’m stuck with L3Hariss, who owns this network.”
Duffy said federal officials feel “very comfortable” that the issue was not caused by a foreign actor. Bedford added that, so far there is also “zero evidence of anything nefarious and zero evidence of anything AI related.”
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