US air travel disruptions to last until Sunday evening
By the AFREEQUE newsroom, based on The Citizen, ZimEye and BFMTV
Air traffic in the United States resumed on Friday evening after a rare suspension lasting several hours that led to 6,000 flight cancellations worldwide, BFMTV reports. The air traffic control system outage affected hundreds of thousands of passengers and disruptions are expected to continue at airports.
US authorities suspended all take-offs after communication problems emerged at 15:36 on the East Coast. Communications and radar systems were operating intermittently at several control centres, preventing air traffic controllers from immediately locating some aircraft. More than 3,500 aircraft already in flight were nevertheless able to land according to established procedures.
Air traffic resumed at 2:15 a.m. Paris time, but Transport Secretary Sean Duffy warned that a return to full capacity would take time. Some aircraft had been diverted to other airports and airlines still had to assist hundreds of thousands of passengers, as Thanksgiving travel approached.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin ruled out a cyberattack and any link to the outage that affected Microsoft on Thursday, while not completely excluding sabotage. Authorities attributed the difficulties to ageing equipment, some of it dating back to the 1960s.
The White House had asked Congress for an additional $30.1 billion to modernise air traffic control. Sean Duffy called for $50 billion, while two communication outages had already disrupted flights at Newark in spring 2025.
