Centinaia di migliaia di persone remained stranded in airport terminals across the United States as the Federal Aviation Administration ordered a complete ground stop of all domestic departures on Friday, November 14, 2026.
The nationwide halt began at 3:36 p.m. Athletic schedules faced severe disruption as professional football and hockey teams remained grounded or were forced to travel by bus, while food and beverage supplies dwindled inside major terminals. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy warned that normal operations could take a couple of days to recover, with more than two thousand flights still canceled for Saturday, November 14.
The emergency directive spared only international flights leaving U.S. airspace toward the Pacific or Atlantic, along with Alaska and Hawaii, which operate autonomous air traffic control systems. The hours of Friday afternoon and night in the United States, which was suddenly left without airplanes, carried a feeling of the end of the world.
Suspicion immediately centered on a newly deployed software platform known as Smart, an acronym for Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories. The technology had been implemented just three days before the failure without the involvement of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association in its design or testing.
Both Duffy and the software manufacturer denied that the new platform caused the outage.
Speaking at the White House, Markwayne Mullin, the Secretary of Homeland Security—which raised questions as to why he appeared instead of Duffy—addressed public anxiety over the rare shutdown, which had few precedents aside from a software issue in 2023 that lasted just over an hour and a half and the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
“[It] is not a new eleven September,” Mullin said, noting that investigators found no evidence of a cyberattack and suspected a technical glitch.
Mullin later clarified that the introduction of new equipment and technology had overloaded legacy systems.
“No human life was ever at risk,” Mullin said after the five-hour closure of U.S. airspace concluded.
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