WashingtonEvery departing flight in the US stopped Friday.
Inbound international flights land only case by case, so connections collapse far beyond American airports.
A communication fault hit every Air Route Traffic Control Center, the regional facilities that direct planes between airports.
Two law enforcement officials said preliminary reports indicate this was not a cyberattack.
The Federal Aviation Administration has not named a cause or said when departures resume.
How each outlet framed it
drawn from 600+ reports worldwide
- The New York Times
- centers on the FAA's notice website going down and erasing dozens of listed advisories as the ground stop was issued
- Le Monde.fr leans critical
- TimesNow
- sequences the order after radio and radar outages hit O'Hare and Midway, and gives the 5pm Eastern expiry
- TRT World
- Nikkei Asia
- places the stop against the $12.5 billion Congress approved last year to fix the FAA's aging communications system
- The War Zone
- sets the stop against the 2023 pilot-alert failure and 9/11, and reports CNN officials' early view that it was not a cyberattack
Sources: The New York Times, The War Zone, Le Monde.fr, TimesNow, TRT World, Nikkei Asia