The FAA's longest nationwide ground stop since 9/11 continued to disrupt flights through the weekend. Over 3,000 U.S. flights were canceled Saturday and close to 1,000 were delayed as of 5:45 a.m. ET, according to FlightAware. Friday saw about 9,000 cancellations and more than 7,000 delays, though some disruptions resulted from bad weather.
The ground stop began around 4 p.m. Friday and lasted more than four hours. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said routers were overloaded with data and provided air traffic control centers with inconsistent information, prompting the FAA to halt departing flights. Duffy blamed outdated U.S. infrastructure and called on Congress to approve more funding to overhaul air traffic control. Trump administration officials said the outage did not appear to be a cyberattack.
Airlines deployed spare planes and crews Saturday to recover from the disruption. About 3 million people typically fly on Saturdays, according to aviation data firm Cirium. The ground stop forced many aircraft to divert to other airports.
College football games faced scheduling changes due to travel delays. The Southeastern Conference announced some games had been moved to Sunday. Duffy said college football teams traveling on charter flights could receive priority and encouraged them to contact the FAA to schedule flight times.
The disruption also affected NBA and NHL teams traveling to weekend games.