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FAA Abruptly Grounds All Flights Over ‘Extraordinary Circumstances’

A message shared with Air Traffic Control towers reads, “All departing traffic should remain ground stopped until further notice.”

The Federal Aviation Administration has issued a nationwide ground stop at all airports due to “extraordinary circumstances” and “reasons of safety.”

“All departing traffic should remain ground stopped until further notice,” an air traffic control advisory posted Friday afternoon read. “Inbound international flights will be managed on a case by case basis.”

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The nationwide ground stop took effect at 3:54 p.m. Friday and is scheduled to remain in effect until 11 p.m. The order allows flights in the air to land, but flights on the ground cannot take off.

Reuters reports that shortly before ​the FAA issued its ground stop order, it halted traffic in Chicago ​due to air traffic control communications issues.

Law enforcement officials have since told CNN there is no evidence of a cyber attack. Expert guests on the network theorized a mishap with a new FAA system upgrade—“SMART,” a cloud-based, AI-supported air traffic management platform that was advertised as going live on Friday—may be to blame.

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin took questions from reporters outside the White House on Friday afternoon, but had little additional information to offer.

“There was no indication as of yet that this was a nefarious attack against us,” he said. “It’s just a telecommunication outage as of right now.”

Still, Mullin insisted that all planes in the air are not in danger and that the ground stop is not the result of a terror attack. However, Mullin still refused to rule out a cyberattack, and even incorrectly stated that this was the first ground stop since the Sept. 11 attacks.

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“We don’t want to get ahead of ourselves,” Mullin said. “Anytime something like this happens, I mean, the last time I believe that we’ve had a national ground stoppage was 9/11. Of course, in DHS, we’re getting a ton of calls saying, ‘Is this a terrorist attack? Is this a terrorist attack?’ Everybody’s safe. There is no reason to be concerned about your loved ones if they’re flying or anything like that.”

Mullin struggled through the second half of his answer, saying, “As we investigate, um, what caused this, you always got to assume that as many cyber attacks that take place, that you make that assumption. So, but, as of right now, that’s not known. So we are, we’re going to continue to work—the first thing we want to do is make sure we restore the communications. We get all the flights on the ground, and then we, we get back normal operations. But we’re going to continue to work to find out what the root of the cause is.”

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on X that the ground stop is due to “a communication issue impacting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers.” Top congressional reporter Jake Sherman, of Punchbowl News, wrote on X that even “key lawmakers are in the dark at the moment about the ground stop.”

It is just the second nationwide ground stop since the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001. The other occurred in January 2023, when the FAA paused domestic departures for less than two hours over a system outage.

The ground stop should not impact the president’s travel plans. The White House announced Thursday that he would remain in Washington over the weekend and not make his typical weekend retreat to Mar-a-Lago.

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Josh FialloBreaking News Reporter

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