On November 13, 2026, flight departures were suspended across the United States for security reasons. By the evening, this decision had already led to the delay of more than 10,000 flights. This was reported by RBC-Ukraine with reference to CNN and The Wall Street Journal.
Scale of the failure
Flight cancellations began on Friday afternoon at 15:53 Washington time. According to FlightAware, as of 17:40, more than 1,100 flights in the U.S. had been canceled and nearly 10,000 had been delayed. The aviation analytics company Cirium estimated that about 11,000 flights were still scheduled from U.S. airports as of 16:00; CNN provided comparable figures.
What is known about the cause
According to a CNN source in the aviation industry, the nationwide outages simultaneously affected air traffic control radars and radio frequencies, and controllers have no clarity regarding the cause or what exactly is happening. Another source told the publication that the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) also does not yet know what is happening: "Ten minutes ago they were in an emergency meeting, and there was still no clear answer regarding the cause."
Technical failure theories
Sources for the WSJ claim that an update to the FAA's private communication network led to its overload and failure, which disrupted communication with air traffic control agencies; according to them, this network is maintained by the company L3Harris. Parallel to this, a CNN source points to a network router problem, which, according to his information, originated at Chicago Midway International Airport and spread across the entire country.
Government reaction and consequences
According to CNN, top aides to U.S. President Donald Trump are monitoring the situation, and the head of the White House has already been informed about the incident. The publication also notes that some airports are already reporting congestion due to the large number of aircraft that are on the ground and unable to take off.
