Ground Stop

real flights, replayed

The stop ended by 8:45 PM, but thousands of departures never happened that night.

2:30 PM ET · Fri Nov 13

2:30p 6:00a

US-airline airborne

—

all aircraft: —

Departures, 5 min

—

US airlines

Missing vs Nov 6

since 3:35 PM

Friday's model said: clear by 2:26 AM

Real record: 8,258 fewer departures by 6 AM

Airline departures every 5 minutes at the 30 busiest hubs

Every plane and count comes from adsb.lol's public ADS-B records, which miss some aircraft; the dashed line is Friday's simulated model, shown for comparison. Data: adsb.lol (ODbL 1.0). · Data licence: ODbL 1.0 · Built by Gemini 4 Hydrogen from one prompt · sidramiconi.com

What happened

On Friday, November 13, 2026, the FAA stopped departures nationwide after an air traffic telecommunications outage.

Ground stops at Chicago O'Hare and Midway for an equipment outage came first.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy blamed overloaded routers that “experienced instability” beginning at 3:36 p.m. Eastern.

Officials said there was no indication of malicious activity at this early stage.

What the data show

Departures stopped within about five minutes of 3:36 PM, and domestic flights did not take off again until 8:45 PM.

At 8:35 PM only 49 US-airline flights were airborne over the US, against 2,624 at the same time on the normal Friday.

There was no catch-up surge: departures first matched a normal Friday's level only at 12:20 AM, and from midnight to 6 AM they ran at the normal Friday-night level, not above it.

Between 3:35 PM and 6 AM, US airlines flew 8,258 fewer departures than the Friday before, and almost none were made up overnight.

ADS-B cannot tell a cancelled flight from one moved past 6 AM; it only shows that the flight did not depart that night.