More than 10,500 flights delayed. More than 2,500 cancelled. And about 4,042 planes were already in the air when the order came down.
That's everything we know.
Why this mattersSo how rare is this? This is the first time every flight in America has been grounded at once since January 2023, when a different system failure stopped flights for about 90 minutes. Before that, you have to go back to 9/11.
Robert Sumwalt used to chair the National Transportation Safety Board. He says quote "This is absolutely unprecedented". He was flying on 9/11, the last time anything like this happened.
Now, here's the twist. This wasn't an attack.
Markwayne Mullin, the Homeland Security Secretary, said there's no sign anyone did this on purpose. He said there is no reason for the public to be afraid for their loved ones. The FBI agrees, for now.
So what actually broke? Two different answers, and nobody has tied them together yet.
CBS News says an update to the communications network behind air traffic control, run by a company called L3Harris, caused the whole system to reboot and crash. CNN says it was a router fault that started at Chicago Midway Airport and spread out from there.
And there's a third question hanging over all of it. The FAA just rolled out a new AI-powered air traffic tool called SMART. Markwayne Mullin says investigators haven't ruled it out. He said you just can't rule out anything at this point.
The company that built that tool says it had nothing to do with it.
Here's the part that makes this sting. On the very same day as the outage, the government asked Congress for $30.1 billion to fix the FAA's old technology. Congress already gave it $12.5 billion for that exact job last year.
So the system that just broke nationwide is the same one the government was already begging for more money to repair.
Donald Trump has been briefed. Nobody has said when the network will be back to normal. And nobody has said yet whether this was a hardware problem or a software one.
