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After hours of airport chaos, confused passengers and little information, federal officials ended a ground stop order that halted planes across the U.S.
The Federal Aviation Administration issued the order around 4 p.m. Friday “due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety.” Around 8:30 p.m. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced the order was lifted, though he said it would take a while for the skies to return to normal.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said there was no evidence of a cyberattack, but the root cause remained under investigation.
Duffy pinned the blame on an outdated air traffic control system and described the problem as a network that got “overloaded with data.”
Thousands of flights were delayed or canceled, leaving passengers waiting at airports. Photos from nearly every city showed packed hallways and lines with passengers searching for any information about when they might be able to travel.
According to FlightAware, more than 9,000 flights were delayed Friday. However, some could have been for weather or other issues before the order was issued.
“There was never any lives at risk,” Mullin said. “There was no flights at risk. FAA was able to handle it. We did it out of an abundance of caution.”
He added that he understood internet conspiracy theories, but there was no indication of something larger at play. He later admitted that as of late Friday there was “nothing completely certain.”
During a White House briefing late Friday, Duffy blamed the nation’s aging air traffic system for the outage. He said the nation relies on an analog system and it got overloaded with data — which Mullin said came from new technology overwhelming the older system.
“We have old switches, old routers. It's an old system that went down and went down everywhere. It got overloaded. I don't want to rule out that we didn't have nefarious activity here,” Duffy said.
Reporters pressed the Trump administration officials on what caused the overload, but neither offered specifics. They also could not explain why the system failed on Friday rather than on any other day.
Duffy used the briefing to rant about Congress and called for more funds to replace the nation’s aging infrastructure. He demanded for $50 billion — up from the $30 billion Trump asked from Congress — to update the nation’s air traffic system.
“Let’s not do a patchwork fix to a system that’s critical for every single family,” Duffy said. “This is a continual problem that we have, and it should be fixed.”
The FAA ground stop order caused problems for passengers nationwide during the five hours it remained in place. College football teams couldn't travel ahead of Saturday games. That led some programs to find alternative ways to travel before kickoff.
For those that waited, Duffy encouraged them to contact officials about their travel plans.
“I would encourage those football teams to reach out to the FAA, to schedule their flight times and make sure they can move” their start time, Duffy said.
Passengers at airports were left waiting for information about when they might be allowed to travel to their destination.
In Atlanta, Ashley Aylward told local outlet WSB-TV that she was on the runway when she got word of the order.
“It brought me back to 9/11. I was definitely nervous, but, I mean, we’re still here. We’re still sitting on the runway and still no word on what’s going on and if we were going back to the gate,” Aylward told the station.
In Boston, Dara Albrecht told The Boston Globe she was on a Dallas-bound flight when passengers were given the option to disembark or wait it out and hope for an eventual takeoff. She said many passengers thought they were in danger and rushed to leave.
After she left the plane, the airport was packed and rideshare lines wrapped around the outside of the terminal. She described it as a “madhouse” as she left and rebooked a flight for Saturday morning.
“I was just glad to get out of the airport,” she told the Globe. “When you got into the terminal it is apocalyptic.”