FAA lifts nationwide ground stop after outage strands travelers at Austin-Bergstrom

AUSTIN, Texas - Hours after the Federal Aviation Administration issued a rare nationwide ground stop on Friday, the agency lifted the order at 7:15 p.m. 

Lingering delays and cancellations continue to frustrate travelers at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport (AUS).

What they're saying:

The halt was triggered by communication issues impacting multiple Air Route Traffic Control Centers across the country. During a White House press briefing, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy attributed the breakdown to aging infrastructure, explaining that outdated analog hardware and routers became overloaded with data.

Because the disruption happened on Friday the 13th—just one day after a major Microsoft Outlook outage—some travelers wondered if the two events were linked. 

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin dismissed any connection during an evening press conference. While Mullin noted there is currently no indication the outage was a cyberattack, officials have not officially ruled it out.

Stranded in Austin

Local perspective:

At Austin-Bergstrom, the sudden halt left hundreds of passengers in limbo—including a woman trying to reach her mother-in-law's 75th birthday celebration, a teenager flying out to see a concert for her 16th birthday, and travelers simply trying to get home.

With communication channels down, passengers said accurate information inside the terminal was hard to come by.

"We are not going back to Korea today," Leonardo Manreque, a stranded international traveler from South Korea said. "We hope that maybe tomorrow, or we don't know when, because the flights are delayed. Before coming here to the airport, we already knew that the flight was delayed, but only for one hour, and right now we have no information."

Others arrived at the terminal only to find sections of the airport at a standstill, with little guidance from airline or airport staff.

"We talked to a lady over here, and she basically just said the whole section with all the restaurants and the gates is just completely closed," passenger Clara Kountoupis traveling for her 16th birthday said. "We don't know what to do with our check-in bags either. And we asked her, 'Okay, then what is everyone doing in here?' And she said, 'I have no idea.' So it sounds like everyone's kind of just standing around waiting for an update."

For those who had already boarded their planes, the wait was just as uncertain. One passenger, Petrina Parker who is traveling for her mother-in-law's 75th birthday recalled her pilot checking in over the intercom every 15 minutes with virtually nothing new to report.

"He'd be like, 'Oh yeah, I'm here to give you an update. There's no update. We haven't heard anything from the company. We haven't heard anything from air traffic control. So we're just going to sit here,'" Parker said. "About an hour and 45 minutes [later], we went back to the gates and then we all had to get off the plane, and then it was just pretty much all these people in the airport just not knowing what to do."

What's next:

Although airspace reopened at 7:15 p.m., officials warned that getting operations back on track will take time as airlines determine whether they have enough available pilots, flight crews, and capacity to clear the backlog tonight or push recovery into Saturday. 

Secretary Duffy noted that larger aircraft carrying 60 to 100 or more passengers are being prioritized first.

To prevent similar system failures in the future, Duffy said he is asking Congress to approve $50 billion for a state-of-the-art facility—an upgrade that would replace the aging infrastructure with new software, hardware, and air traffic control towers.

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