BREAKING: Federal Aviation Administration orders national ground stop, citing ‘extraordinary circumstances’

The Federal Aviation Administration issued a national ground stop on all inbound and outbound flights, Friday afternoon, citing “extraordinary circumstances” and “reasons of safety.”

All airports are “ground stopped” until further notice, and inbound international flights “will be managed on a case-by-case basis,” the FAA said, per multiple reports. The order was issued shortly before 4 p.m. ET. The FAA is working to land all planes in the air. New flights are prevented from taking off.

“The FAA issued a nationwide ground stop for all U.S. airports following communication issues impacting multiple Air Route Traffic Control Centers,” an FAA spokesperson told Heartlander News, repeating a statement posted by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. “FAA technicians are investigating the issue. We will provide updates.”

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told reporters the order was caused by a telecommunication outage.

“There’s no indication this was a terrorist attack right now,” Mullin said around 5 p.m. ET. “Everybody is safe. Flights are accounted for and there should be no fear to the public at all.”

Mullin said airplanes can still communicate but at “different levels” and that the order was given out of “an abundance of caution.”

This is reportedly only the second ground order since 9/11 and first since an outage to an FAA pilot-alerting system in January of 2023 halted air traffic for about 90 minutes.

The National Weather Service announced a national radar outage. It was not immediately known if this was related to the ground order.

This story is developing.