On November 13, 2026, U.S. air traffic control went dark. A communications failure grounded every departure in the country for 4 hours and 21 minutes, with more than 3,500 aircraft already in the air.
This full report breaks down what really happened, minute by minute. At 3:36 p.m. Eastern, radar and radio links at the nation's air route traffic control centers became unstable. At 3:54 p.m., the Federal Aviation Administration ordered only the third nationwide ground stop in its history. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy blamed aging analog routers that were overloaded with data after a network update, and he is now asking Congress for $50 billion to rebuild the system. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin says there is no evidence of a cyberattack, but it has not been ruled out, and investigators are still looking at the FAA's new SMART artificial intelligence system.
We also look at what almost nobody covered: while every airliner was frozen, U.S. military aircraft kept flying. We explain how military air traffic control works, from air base towers to the control center inside an aircraft carrier, and what the outage means for the 22 centers that run America's high-altitude sky. Nearly 10,000 flights were canceled through Saturday, less than two weeks before the Thanksgiving rush.
Source: The Navy Channel
