Today, Saturday, November 14, 2026, US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced that US airspace reopened at 8:15 p.m. Eastern Time (1:15 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time), but warned that flights would resume gradually and that airlines needed time to restore normal operations.
According to figures from the "FlightRadar24" website, more than 6,600 flights were canceled and another 8,600 delayed because of the outage. A further 1,500 flights had already been canceled for Sunday, leaving tens of thousands of travelers stranded at airports and sending shares of major US airlines lower in financial markets.
Regarding the cause of the problem, the US transportation secretary explained that at 3:36 p.m., switches and routing devices (routers) came under heavy data pressure and supplied corrupted information. They were therefore shut down to protect the system, enabling thousands of aircraft to land safely. Sean Duffy criticized Congress for failing to provide funding to modernize the outdated air-traffic-control system and called for $50 billion to be allocated for fundamental improvements in the sector.
Meanwhile, US Homeland Security Secretary Marco Rubio said at the White House, following a meeting with US President Donald Trump, that there was so far no evidence that the problem had been caused by a cyberattack or artificial intelligence. He said it appeared to be mechanical, but investigations were continuing in coordination with the National Security Agency.
