On Friday afternoon, November 13, 2026, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a rare nationwide ground stop halting all departing commercial and civilian flights at airports across the United States. In its official air traffic advisory, the agency stated that traffic was being held on the ground until further notice “due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety,” adding that international flights entering U.S. airspace would be managed on a case-by-case basis while aircraft already airborne continued safely to their destinations.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and FAA spokespeople confirmed that the halt was triggered by a widespread communications failure impacting Air Route Traffic Control Centers (ARTCCs)—the regional en-route control facilities responsible for guiding high-altitude air traffic across the continental United States. According to initial FAA reports and internal agency documentation, the breakdown involved a “rolling frequency outage” across multiple parts of the country that disrupted air-to-ground radio communications between controllers and aircraft in flight.

FAA technicians launched an immediate investigation to isolate and restore the affected telecommunications and radio frequency infrastructure, though officials noted in the initial hours of the outage that the underlying root cause of the communications failure had not yet been determined. The November 13, 2026 order marks only the third nationwide U.S.ground stop in modern aviation history, following the January 2023 outage of the FAA’s Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) pilot alert system and the total closure of U.S. airspace in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.