12,500 Flights Canceled in Two Days: The Longest FAA Ground Stop Since 9/11 Is Still Wrecking Saturday Travel

12,500 Flights Canceled in Two Days: The Longest FAA Ground Stop Since 9/11 Is Still Wrecking Saturday Travel

If you’re stuck in an airport right now, here’s the full picture of what happened to your weekend.

On Friday afternoon, the FAA did something it has only done once since 9/11: it stopped every departing flight in America. The nationwide ground stop hit around 3:54 PM Eastern, with roughly 3,500 planes already in the air, and it lasted more than four hours — the longest nationwide ground stop in 25 years — before the FAA lifted it around 8:15 PM Friday night.

The cause, per Trump administration officials, was new technology being added to the air traffic control system overloading antiquated equipment, producing intermittent communications and radar gaps at the centers that manage high-altitude traffic. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy pinned it on overloaded switches and routers that began feeding inconsistent data and shut down, and he used the moment to ask Congress for $50 billion for a complete overhaul of the system. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said more than 3,000 flights landed safely during the chaos Friday and stressed there was no danger to passengers and no indication of a cyberattack.

The bill for the mess is still being counted. According to FlightAware, Friday ended with 9,138 U.S. flights canceled and more than 7,000 delayed. Saturday started ugly and stayed ugly: more than 3,400 cancellations by mid-morning and over 1,100 delays, pushing the two-day cancellation total past 12,500. By early Saturday, Delta had canceled 629 flights — a fifth of its schedule — United 510, American 471, Southwest 304, and JetBlue 335, a brutal 40% of everything JetBlue planned to fly. Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson led the nation’s airports in cancellations.

The scramble even reached college football: with Saturday games hours away, Duffy publicly encouraged NCAA teams to contact the FAA so their flights could be prioritized. JetBlue, for its part, is waiving change and cancel fees and fare differences on flights from Friday and Saturday.

This was the first nationwide ground stop since January 2023, when a failed pilot-notification system shut down departures — and only the second since September 11, 2001. Airlines warn the recovery will bleed into the rest of the weekend as planes and crews sit in the wrong cities, so if you’re flying before Monday, check your flight before you leave for the airport and expect the apps to keep moving the goalposts.

And because this weekend wasn’t strange enough, the ground stop was one of three infrastructure failures in 48 hours: a Microsoft 365 outage that started November 12 hammered Outlook and Teams worldwide, and a Workday outage Friday night locked employees at Walmart, Target and thousands of other companies out of their pay and benefits systems. Three systems, three causes, no connection found between them — just everything breaking at once.

Sources: Associated Press reporting on the ground stop and Saturday recovery; FlightAware cancellation and delay data; Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s public statements; the ground stop was flagged on X by WorldStar (@WORLDSTAR) and Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh).