Four hours, that’s how long the total blockade of air traffic in America lasted. A stop that came suddenly – when it is around 9pm in Italy on a Friday evening – which has generated fear throughout the world. The US government attempted to reassure: “Problems in telecommunications. It is not 9/11, no cyber attack and there is no connection with the Microsoft blackout.” But it wasn’t enough to avoid confusion.
The blockade caused nearly seven thousand cancellations on Friday alone and more than 8,600 delays. For today, Saturday 14 November, around 1,800 flights have already been cancelled. We understand what happened, how to “read” the stop sign and what happens now.
The safety of the flying public is always the FAA’s highest priority. The FAA lifted the ground stop and some flight departures are resuming. Before clearing flights to resume, we thoroughly tested our systems to confirm they were stable and that operations remain reliable. Passengers should contact their airlines for flight updates.
— The FAA ✈️ (@FAANews) November 14, 2026
What happened
Let’s rewind the tape. “For safety reasons”, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ordered the total and immediate “ground stop” of flights. That is: everyone on the ground. At the request of the FAA, in the meantime, Eurocontrol, the European organization for the safety of air navigation (42 member states including Italy) has suspended all takeoffs towards the USA.
Under the protocols, aircraft already in flight maintained their last assigned clearance (including trajectory, altitude, speed and heading) and used “visual flight” rules and “pilot-to-pilot” communication to maintain safety conditions in the event of a breakdown in communications with the ground.
The causes
“There is no indication that it is a malicious attack: for now, it is only a matter of interruption of telecommunications. We are not under attack, there is no danger. It is not a new September 11th”, assured the Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS) Markwayne Mullin, from the West Wing of the White House, after almost an hour of uncertainty.
The reason is the probable overload of the data transmitted by the routers, which would have knocked out many radio frequencies used to communicate with the pilots on the ground. “It’s because of obsolete infrastructure,” Trump said, according to a Fox News reporter.
In other words, the technological updates made “overloaded the pre-existing system” of the FAA, causing it to collapse.
Update from The White House https://t.co/pNjkz3znSB
— The FAA ✈️ (@FAANews) November 14, 2026
The blockade, as mentioned, was removed after 4 hours and the Secretary of Transport, Sean Duffy, in a press conference at the White House spoke of a real emergency for the modernization of the structures and asked Congress to allocate 50 billion dollars. “Will it happen again? I don’t know if this scenario will happen,” he added.
The strange coincidence
The block, there is no denying it, arrived at a delicate moment in which hacker attacks follow one another and there was also the paralysis of some Microsoft services. It’s natural to hypothesize a connection.
Mullin, however, clarified: “There is no indication that the collapse of the system is related to a cyber attack, Microsoft’s problems with Outlook or an action related to artificial intelligence.”
The return to normality
And now? Once the block is lifted, we return to normality. However, it is not an immediate transition. “It will be slow,” American officials admitted. However, tens of thousands of flights have been cancelled.
The previous one
There is a precedent. In 2023 the Federal Aviation Administration stopped all domestic flights due to problems with a new alarm system. A rare move.
Scrolling back the calendar there is another case: it was September 11, 2001, the day of the attack on the Twin Towers.