FAA Orders Nationwide Departure Halt; Microsoft Outage Hits Airline Email

WASHINGTON — The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ordered a nationwide departure halt on November 13 after communications problems affected regional air traffic control centers, the Associated Press reported.

AP reported that Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said FAA technicians were investigating the communications issue and that the agency imposed the ground stop for safety reasons.

At 18:21 EST, the FAA's live airport-status dashboard listed an average departure delay of 180 mins at Chicago O’Hare International Airport (ORD), attributed to FAA equipment. The entry had been updated at 18:10 EST.

In its 17:27 EST update, AP's live coverage of the FAA disruption reported no clear timeline for resuming flights.

Cirium Snapshot Shows the Day’s Disruptions

In data supplied to Airways, aviation analytics company Cirium counted 481 flights as canceled or “no fly” out of 26,284 scheduled departures from U.S. airports on November 13. The 16:40 EST snapshot represented 1.83% of the day's scheduled departures.

Cirium cautioned that the figures could include earlier cancellations unrelated to the ground stop, including weather disruptions. Its “no fly” category covers a scheduled flight that had not departed within 180 mins of its scheduled departure time. The combined figure is therefore not a count of cancellations caused by the FAA outage.

About 11,000 flights were still scheduled to depart from U.S. airports after 16:00 EST, Cirium said. Its airport breakdown listed 30 canceled or no-fly departures out of 533 at John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK), or 5.63%, and 26 out of 533 at LaGuardia Airport (LGA), or 4.88%.

Why the Control Centers Matter

Air route traffic control centers primarily manage aircraft flying under instrument flight rules during the en route phase, the FAA explains. Airport towers handle traffic at and near individual airports. A communications problem affecting the centers therefore reaches a different part of the network from a fault confined to one airport tower.

In September, Duffy outlined plans to seek another US$30bn for U.S. air traffic control and airport modernization, covering towers, telecommunications, technology and airport improvements.

Microsoft Outage Disrupts Airline Email

The FAA account reported by AP and Microsoft's service update do not establish a connection between the disruptions.

Microsoft was also working to restore services after a global outage that began November 12, according to AP's coverage of the disruption and airline responses.

Earlier Friday, IndiGo (6E) said its email support was disrupted but other support channels and flight operations were unaffected. Air India (AI) said flights were unaffected and that it had rerouted email to keep receiving customer messages, AP reported.

In its 17:00 EST service-health update, Microsoft reported sustained recovery across affected environments. It said it believed most affected scenarios had been addressed, while it continued monitoring services and the email backlog before considering the incident resolved.

Microsoft identified disruption to features that depend on Exchange Online email services. It said most core Teams calling, meeting and messaging functions were unaffected.