Overview
- The FAA ordered a nationwide stop to all departing flights after regional air‑traffic centers began losing radar and voice communications around 3:36 p.m. ET, and the agency reopened departures for gradual resumption at 8:15 p.m. ET.
- Officials traced the outage to overloaded network routers sending inconsistent data into the FAA communications network and said investigators are probing hardware, software updates and other causes.
- The FBI opened a criminal probe while federal officials reported no current evidence of a deliberate cyberattack.
- Flight trackers and airline tallies show disruptions of several thousand flights, with large numbers of cancellations, long delays and hundreds of diversions that left many travelers stranded and pressed rail and car services as alternatives.
- The incident exposed reliance on decades‑old systems, pushed the administration to increase its ATC modernization request to $50 billion, and accelerated plans to phase out legacy media such as floppy disks by the end of 2028.