FAA grounds flights nationwide after communications failure. Nobody knows what caused it.

The FAA ordered a nationwide halt to departing flights Friday after communications problems disrupted air traffic control. Planes already in the air could land, but departures across the country were stopped. Thousands of travelers were affected.

BREAKING: The Federal Aviation Administration has issued a nationwide ground stop for flights across the United States on Friday, Nov. 13, citing extraordinary circumstances and safety concerns.
The directive instructs all departing aircraft to remain on the ground until further… pic.twitter.com/eYBb4xHB8u
— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) November 13, 2026

Issued by the FAA just moments ago, ALL US airports are currently ground stopped. This means NO flights may depart for US airports. Flights already in the air will be allowed to land. This is related to an FAA equipment outage. pic.twitter.com/wgyuOXeF0k
— Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) November 13, 2026

Breaking news: The US aviation regulator has grounded all departing flights across the country until further notice. https://t.co/YffZrvkRg1 pic.twitter.com/BCou6ngy5L
— Financial Times (@FT) November 13, 2026

And the timing is hard to ignore. Microsoft had a major outage Thursday. Now air traffic control communications are down nationwide. The FAA says it is investigating, but there is no evidence yet that Iran hacked the system or that the two outages are connected.

The bigger concern is that the FAA has been warned about vulnerabilities in aviation communications. A September 2026 GAO report flagged gaps in threat assessments and real-time monitoring for interference such as signal jamming and spoofing.

Was this a technical failure, a cyberattack or something else? We don’t know. But the government needs to explain exactly what happened.